What's wrong with the UX of IRC?

* No user accounts, except via a baffling NickServ process involving things like 'ghosting'

* Poor abuse tools, e.g. accidentally IP-banning web IRC gateways.

* No searchable history

* No scrollback / visibility of messages that arrived while you were offline

* No support for uploading images or files.

* No sharing of a single identity / session across multiple clients (e.g. phone+pc+laptop)

As a veteran IRC user I know you can mitigate these problems by getting a shell account on an always-on unix server and running Irssi in Screen over SSH with logging, automated NickServ login, a bot to provide !seen and !tell, sharing images via Imgur, sharing files by uploading them to my personal website, and so on.

Slack has simply looked at the big collection of bodges I just described and made them native features. And you don't even need to know to use Ctrl+Alt+2 to change between channels like you do with ssh+screen+irssi.

> What's wrong with the UX of IRC?

One sentence later:

> ...we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text).

Clearly something was wrong with the UX if only one person was willing to use it?

This place is a parody of itself sometimes.

I think they may have left off the "s" from developers, based on context it seems like there must have been multiple people who liked it enough to build plugins. Sounds more like a "developers vs. management" kind of thing rather than "our one IT guy tried to sell the whole company on IRC".

Typo aside, that does not materially affect the point. “Management” in this case appears to be every other team at the company...

The point you were making is that a single rabid IRC fan was trying to steer the rest of the company, so actually I'd say the typo certainly does affect the point.

Exactly.

And the only company out there that was able to stitch together more or less usable UX for a group messenger is Slack. IRC has no such killer app (sorry IRC fans!..)

Can you log on to IRC from your phone and then instantly search through all of your company's chat history through the last couple of years?

Sure, that's exactly what I'm doing all the time.

I can search my logs easily https://i.imgur.com/nTpoYs0.png (soon with even better integration, the prototype is a separate web app), and I can just open the web client or app on any device on this planet and instantly have all my logs and channels, and just chat: https://i.k8r.eu/54BPMQ.png

Of course, I use self-hosted quassel and quasseldroid.

Many other projects such as weechat and IRCCloud are also working on making IRC better than slack at everything it does — IRCCloud has a web client, mobile client, hosted team servers, a slack bridge, reactions, threads, emoji, attachments, and all you'd want from slack, natively.

Other projects such as IRC.com are also working on bringing the feq advantages Slack has back to IRC to make it more attractive.

The one single real advantage of Slack is marketing. They can call companies and spend a lot on money on getting more customers, due to the VC funding.

"The one single real advantage of Slack is marketing."

Respectfully, NO.

Providing a very useful turnkey set of features out of the box that are technically possible but fiddly and hard to use in IRC is in and of itself a huge advantage. This is why they're successful. This is why people use it. This is why people use it who barely know what a command line IS.

If you want that, you can just use IRCCloud, it has all that in a single solution. Just like Slack.

IRCCloud can even connect to Slack workspaces.

The only advantage Slack has over IRCCloud is marketing.

It's relatively ironic that I have to end up praising IRCCloud here, considering I'm contributing to a competing IRC client.

But when you use IRCCloud you don't use the IRC protocol anymore, you use the IRCCloud protocol. Which is the same as using the Slack protocol. Your features aren't available outside IRCCloud. Your account, your data, your history, everything is tied to IRCCloud. You haven't gained anything compared to Slack. You're advocating for the _exact_ same model and you don't realize that the only way to have the same features as Slack in an easy way is to basically do what Slack does. You're just agreeing with what the parent is saying.

IRCCloud can connect to normal IRC servers, and normal IRC clients can connect to IRCCloud servers — and you can export your logs and import them elsewhere.

That makes it much closer to the open ideal than Slack is.

I use both. IRCCloud isn’t close to slack in terms of features or feel.

> Of course, I use self-hosted quassel and quasseldroid.

That sounds exactly like the infamous first comments on the HN Dropbox post. I'd rather pay someone to use their app than go through the pain of self-hosting and administering yet another service.

Well, the post was "just use FTP with rsync".

Quassel on the other hand is to Slack what Seafile or NextCloud are to Dropbox — definitely not as comfortable, as you need some knowledge to self host it, but it's easily doable for everyone on this site, and once it's set up, it's just as comfortable.

Of course, if one wants to use a hosted service, there are solutions like that — IRCCloud is pretty much identical to Slack, except based on IRC, and in addition to paid team workspaces, you can also connect to any IRC network and use the same features there.

So, you see, while it has some hints of the same attitude as the original post — and definitely, neither of these products is as polished as Slack, after all we can't make 380k$ losses a day, while Slack can — they fulfil pretty much the same purpose with pretty much the same ease of use

And of course work on single-click deployments and hosted services for more such products has already started

> but it's easily doable for everyone on this site

And that's where you lost sight of the big picture. Slack is _not_ for people on this site it's specifically for people out there: people who don't know and don't need to know what a protocol is, who don't care about netsplits, who couldn't be bothered to install some random stupid stuff on their machine and spend an afternoon configuring it just to be able to talk to their co-worker. We're not the target here. And yet it has convinced some of us because it ticks so many boxes by default.

You can, if you log everything... and there are many websites that provide search engines for public channels... you could do the same for your private IRC server. If you don't mind having all of your data in the cloud, use slack.