This said to me "Riot is just a messaging app" and I bounced. I'd recommend changing that tagline to indicate briefly why a user might use Riot instead of Slack or Whatsapp
Riot is based on Matrix. If you scrolled down, it would tell you that it's got strong crypto, you can run your own servers, it's got really good cross-protocol bridges, and a ton of other stuff. And it's totally free, save the cost of running your own server if you choose to do so.
With that you mean "a worse IRC bridge than Slack"? Every user and dev of IRC clients and servers I’ve talked to in the past weeks has only complained about Matrix’ bridge.
The main difference is that Matrix acts effectively as a bouncer, bouncing all the different clients into IRC, rather than a bridge - unlike Slack's bridge which is just a single bot.
We're aware that we haven't enabled membership list syncing into Matrix yet from IRC (due to performance issues on synapse), but otherwise it should be pretty good.
The most complaints are about not working private messages to Matrix users (because the bridge doesn’t join people), about the bridge de-syncing from IRC – and you suddenly having every matrix user thrice in the channel, and similar issues.
General stability, ability to chat with Matrix users as if they were there natively, etc.
I've been using the Freenode-to-Matrix-bridged Freenode IRC rooms for around a month now and am pretty happy, besides the occasional glitch due to Matrix and its bridges still being in beta.