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Re:Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again by TeMPOraL on Monday May 20, 2019 @05:08PM (#19965213)
Google is an improvement on Altavista. Slack is a downgrade on IRC in everything except the lowest common denominator UX and pushing ops to someone else.

The new SaaS companies integrate what used to be two (three) separate things - the client and the protocol (and the server). The way they do this forces everyone to use the common client that's not optimized for power users. Which is kind of nasty, because it's the power users that have to suffer the interface the most, as we use it day in, day out at our dayjobs.

Re:Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again by afiori on Monday May 20, 2019 @06:49PM (#19966056)
But power users are a very small minority also, nobody argues that IRC should disappear but is still not a replacement for most other messaging platforms.

I too would have liked an open protocol in principle, but looking at emails I am not sure it would have been a good thing. (As in eternal backwards compatibility and unchangeable architectural choices that might not suit a very different future use)