Managed and modern. Seriously show me an IRC client that supports images, threads, emoji reactions (yes they really are useful), painless file transfers, etc.
Hell IRC doesn't even let you browse history. How can you people not see that Slack is vastly superior to IRC (apart from the openness of course).
Fun, sure, but useful? Ehh...I dunno. It seems like you have some specific use in mind and I'm curious, so if you don't mind me asking, what do you use them for?
They're useful to see support of a message, without requiring the responder to say "I agree with $MESSAGE_FROM_SOME_TIME_AGO".
This is both useful for weeding out mostly-pointless "I agree" statements, and for encouraging people who would not otherwise send support to do so.
Compare this, without emojis:
user1: I think we should try $THING.
user2: Yes, that's useful.
user3: But what about $OTHER_THING?
user4: I agree.
user3: See, $USER4 agrees with me.
user1: $OTHER_THING is too pricy for us right now.
user4: No, I was typing at the same time. I agree we should try $THING.
user5: $OTHER_THING is my preference!
user6: I've used $THING before and loved it!
to this, with emojis:
user1: I think we should try $THING. (5 :+1: emojis)
user3: But what about $OTHER_THING? (1 :+1: emoji)
user1: $OTHER_THING is too pricy for us right now.
user6: I've used $THING before and loved it!
Note that in my example, people were more chatty than they normally were, but not everyone who responded with an emoji in the emoji version even responded with a message in the no-emoji version.
> They're useful to see support of a message, without requiring the responder to say "I agree with $MESSAGE_FROM_SOME_TIME_AGO".
Messages on this websites have a number of points associated with them based on the number of upvotes and downvotes they get (if any). But we can't directly see the number of points a particular post has (though we can indirectly infer it by how it's sorted compared to its sibling messages and whether the text is grey rather than black).
But, even without this information, the vast majority of posts and responses are informative and have some substance. For example, I didn't just post a 2 word response to your post saying "I disagree".
Forums that didn't have voting or emoji reaction support didn't have problems with "me too" posts. Neither did usenet.
As a counter to that, GitHub had a very bad problem with that before they added emojis to issues/PRs. There were hundreds and hundreds of issues with countless "I agree" messages across major projects.
In that case, some moderation (manual or through automated tools) could be used to address the issue.
On that note, I noticed that my original post was downvoted. I personally think that it would be more useful if the person who downvoted it had posted a reply instead and detailed the reasons they disagreed with what I posted earlier (like you did). The latter contributes to the discussion. The former doesn't really provide any useful information other than someone out there disagrees with me and I have no insight as to why.
In the Slacks I frequent they are often used for a ACK/+1 without creating the noise and interruption (from notifications) that a new message in a channel or thread would give.
Also they can be used for quick votes.
Github signal/noise has increased significantly from emoji reactions reducing all the 'me too' comments.
Ad-hoc polls, for one. Also useful for quietly acknowledging a message without sending a noisy notification. If I report an update to a supervisor during a production incident I'd rather get thank-you reaction then a reply that triggers a notification.
One example is we have an integration that posts a task that needs attention. I put the construction worker emoji to indicated it’s being handled then replaced it with the check mark emoji once complete.
I pay $50/year to irccloud.com just for some of those features.
One major problem with IRC is that nobody else does. Just a few other nerds are running irssi on a VPS. It's hard to grow a community when everyone is offline as soon as they close their laptop.
Compare that to all of the out of the box conveniences of Slack/Discord, there's no contest.
>everyone is offline as soon as they close their laptop
That's the killer app for Slack. Not images or emoji or gifs or file transfer, that's just icing on the cake. The killer is that everyone is "online" even if they're offline. As long as your message isn't time sensitive, you can fire it off and when the person logs back in they will see it.
Everyone who says Slack is just IRC is ignoring the fact that IRC doesn't allow you to chat with people who are offline. That's the game changer.
Still, the fact that you have discord, mattermost and rocketchat and bunch of clones shows that they don't really have a unique tech offering, or a long future ahead for that matter.
Well, show me a "slack" client that Iranian hackers can use (yes, they are really useful).
> How can you people not see
History, I guess? Any sort of online communication tool that requires a master isn't one; it's simply contributing to a network effect that needs to be monetised. That it exchanges messages is almost coincidental.
Frankly, the fact that IRC has a high barrier of entry means the signal to noise ratio on it is way better than traditional chat apps, at least inside of companies.
Hell IRC doesn't even let you browse history. How can you people not see that Slack is vastly superior to IRC (apart from the openness of course).