This should be an indication to you that you are missing information or making incorrect assumptions.

There are some features that aren't available on basic IRC, such as search, history, message emoji responses, message reminders, threading, rich integrations (eg. actionable notifications, polls, etc.) and so on.

Aside from Rich Integration (which is arguably also there if you include bots/scripting), most IRC clients have search, history, emoji, and reminders. What's missing I think is a pretty UI and lots of marketing.

> most IRC clients have search, history, emoji, and reminders.

Keyword: most. So: not all of them. So, there will be a mismatch and a mish-mash between features.

Lets' talk about search and history. How about synchronised history and search across devices? Mobile? Available to new clients that just connected?

At this point someone on HN suggests IRCCloud... which is exactly the same as Slack (proprietary chat-as-a-service).

> > most IRC clients have search, history, emoji, and reminders.

> Keyword: most. So: not all of them. So, there will be a mismatch and a mish-mash between features.

You can't judge a protocol by the subset of UI features supported by all of its clients. That's unfair to all open protocols.

If you want to talk about UI, you should evaluate each client independently.

> At this point someone on HN suggests IRCCloud... which is exactly the same as Slack (proprietary chat-as-a-service).

Except IRCCloud still uses the open protocol, so it's easier for users to switch to a different client. (Which, hopefully, is also an insentive for IRCCloud to not fuck up things too much in the future.)

Users rightfully don't care about protocols. They care about features I listed (and a few others).

That's the main reason IRC and XMPP more-or-less lost the chat wars (and they lost the mobile specifically due to protocols).

Emoji works on IRC.

But custom ones require a lot of work / effort which nobody wants to do. And not all IRC clients support emoji.

There’s always some (client, feature) tuple that isn’t supported. This very post is about Slack’a own web client not supporting smartphones!

IRC is missing two major things.

1. If you are logged out you miss the history of conversations

2. Usability for non tech people. Not everyone in chat has technical prowess, I know IRC seems simple but its too intimidating for some.

> Usability for non tech people. Not everyone in chat has technical prowess, I know IRC seems simple but its too intimidating for some.

I communicated via IRC with a lot of non-technical people in the '90s and 2000s. Most people just used mIRC and connected to the default IRC server and went from there.

> Usability for non tech people

It's not just non-technical people who expect good UX.

It's not the end user features. It's the admin features. You can very easily read everyone's messages, see stats on who's talking to whom the most, control who has access to what channels. The customer is the business ownership, and the product is control.

Comms. Everyone one needs comm. The market is massive. Like soft drinks, even a small slice of the market can be fairly lucrative.