I just think it doesn't actually fit any purpose. For quick chats irc is faster and more accessible, and for long thoughtful discussions Slack is lacking a lot of features so that you might as well use email.

A lot of discussion from this post from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227115

How is IRC in any way faster or more accessible than Slack for quick chats? Does IRC fit a purpose? If so, what? And how does it do anything better than Slack?

Slack is certainly no email replacement, and nor will I ever use it for such but in my experience and for the purposes I use it for, it is far, far more featured than IRC, unless you're using some uber IRC client that I'm unaware of.

I'm genuinely trying to understand out how anyone would think IRC is better than Slack and I speak as someone who used IRC from the early 90s up until only a few years ago when the communities I'm part of upped sticks and moved over to Slack.

Personally, I cannot make a comparison between Slack and IRC because I have never tried the former. From the discussion, it is clear that Slack has many features and attractions that are not available or harder to obtain with IRC.

However, for me personally, a major attraction of IRC is that I can easily use it from within Emacs, and automatically have the same Emacs key bindings available that I also use for navigating and editing files.

With IRC, I can therefore quickly copy and paste text between chats and programs, search the history etc., all in the existing Emacs session, using the same key bindings, with direct access to built-in features such as autocompletion, dynamic abbreviation and spell checking, and — importantly! — without switching applications.

There is an emacs Slack client, though I don't know if you'll find it a seamless migration or as polished as what you're used to with IRC: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Slack

I think that was something available to Slack in the past when it had it's IRC gateway. Sadly they closed that down.

We all have our own ways of doing things and I personally prefer to have applications run independently so I like my Slack client and my IDE and terminal etc. etc. separate.

I've always found if one tool can do it all, it's generally a worse experience than dedicated software applications and doing a Cmd-TAB (I'm on a Mac) is just as simple as switching to another window in a single application

To each their own. I’d hate chat and other things intermingled.

Just to follow up, I work for a distributed company where everyone works remotely. It's an essential tool for us to communicate quickly and easily, when talking over skype/video chat is not necessarily suitable or necessary every time one of us has a question. For our organisation, Slack fits the purpose perfectly.

> Curious as to what specifically you think Slack gets wrong?

Personally: responsiveness. Slack's native app on linux is slow. Switching channels has a noticeable delay, switching Workspaces takes seconds if you haven't used the workspace for a while. Starting the program takes ~8s on my machine (three workspaces, i7 with SSDs and 32G RAM).

For most IRC clients or Telegram, startup times are about as fast as Slack changes a channel, and there are no noticable delays when switching channels/IMs etc.

Haven't noticed any issue with responsiveness with the official Slack client but my boss was kind enough to set me up with a pretty beefy Macbook Pro with more RAM than I'd ever need to use.

It may be an issue with their linux client (pretty much all developers I work with are on linux), though I have heard complaints from windows users as well (but it's windows and the users are from the design team, so who knows what their computers do).