I used IRC a bit in the mid 90s when I first encountered this whole internet thingy. Even though I was young and dumb, it struck me as a bit lame: nerd bullshit with fiddly setup. The async aspects of usenet and email struck me as more scalable, and the web had, you know... graphics.
I had to use IRC again in 2015, and pretty much nothing had changed, except now I was 20 years older.
Most of the criticisms of Slack seem to boil down to: this (whatever it is) is something IRC could do. But it (whatever it is) is virtually always something IRC doesn't do, something it does in some half-arsed fashion (that requires a huge amount of fiddly setup), or something that's supported by only a few clients. How is this not obvious? I'm perpetually mystified that anybody would admit in public to not understanding why Slack is taking a massive dump on IRC.
(Criticisms of Slack's closed nature are valid. It's also worth asking why it has to take up 2GBytes of RAM just to show a tree view, an HTML view and a text box! But don't tell me that you can't understand why Slack is winning anyway.)
I had to use IRC again in 2015, and pretty much nothing had changed, except now I was 20 years older.
Most of the criticisms of Slack seem to boil down to: this (whatever it is) is something IRC could do. But it (whatever it is) is virtually always something IRC doesn't do, something it does in some half-arsed fashion (that requires a huge amount of fiddly setup), or something that's supported by only a few clients. How is this not obvious? I'm perpetually mystified that anybody would admit in public to not understanding why Slack is taking a massive dump on IRC.
(Criticisms of Slack's closed nature are valid. It's also worth asking why it has to take up 2GBytes of RAM just to show a tree view, an HTML view and a text box! But don't tell me that you can't understand why Slack is winning anyway.)