[optimusclimb]

Hipchat took standard IRC, and added some interface fluff, youtube links, and emojis. They achieved great market footprint.

Then Slack starts up later - makes literally the same exact product, and manages to surpass, and eventually subsume Hipchat.

Crazy.

[mdeeks]

HipChat had some major uptime issues. I have friends who experienced whole day outages at their companies.

I hear a lot of people on HN say it was "Just IRC" and I'm always surprised by that. If IRC was so compelling then why didn't it take off? Why did Slack have a meteoric rise? It can't be for no good reason.

I think the answer is that the interface fluff they added is actually extremely important and valuable. They made it dead simple, and fun to use for EVERYONE. My limited experience with IRC was honestly not great (please don't kill me, I'm sorry). Where is the mobile app? How do I get notified when I'm not online? What is EFNet/Freenode/etc? I use a slash command and paste my password in plain text to login? I can't just paste an image?

Social apps are extremely difficult to get right. People seem to discount "silly" things like Emoji reactions. Honestly it DOES sound silly to say this, but it really is a great way to express and communicate. This is especially true for our large and diverse team. It also cuts down a TON of message spam ("Congrats!", "Yay!" etc)

[hiccuphippo]

My Linux user group used to hangout in IRC until 3 or 4 years ago when little by little we stopped joining the channel. Some of us tried IRC clients for smartphone and it was a lousy experience.

Until one day someone created a Telegram group. Now we are all there, the conversation might not be as fluid as IRC, each is in their own timezone, but it is there.

[conquistadog]

Scrappy founder here. Telegram crushes it for low latency, instantly synched desktop/mobile flexibility, easy topic channels and groups, and trivial bot API. I've not seen anything do what it does as perfomantly.

For code, wiki, and issues, it's self hosted Gitea. It's a dream to fire up thanks to Go and SQLite, and users forget you're not at GitHub.

Nothing more than those two plus email needed here, yet anyway.

[phil21]

Yes, IRC I think finally "failed" once persistence went from "nice to have" to "need to have" feature. Yes, you can work around this if you are a top 20% techie who enjoys that stuff, but most don't.

Mobile basically made the "all clients synced from anywhere" a necessity, and then lack of IRC client development for things like rich media hurt to boot.

[yborg]

>If IRC was so compelling then why didn't it take off Define 'take off'. It was quite popular in the 90s and early 00s, but not in comparison to say AIM or ICQ for example. But where are those two networks now ... and IRC is still there.

People seldom seem to acknowledge this, but software apps go through fads just like everything else. Slack won because it was the new hotness and it was able to get the network effect snowball. Especially in the beginning, small things matter a lot, and Slack was pretty polished right out of the box.

IRC's main issues in my opinion are a lack of integrated file/attachment handling (you can't just post that meme GIF in a channel without finding someplace to upload it first) and hideous clients. If there were more free clients like the Colloquy Mac client I still use even though it basically has been abandonware for almost a decade, I think IRC would have had an easier time getting traction.

[forkerenok]

> Crazy.

Indeed so, if judging in a reference frame of gross oversimplifications and dismissing importance of details.

I hate Slack, the client, the cloud lock-in. But I think they and those in between of golden IRC times and them did refine team chatting experience.

Speaking of my own experience: it's now easier to follow discussions and way easier to form more complex messages (mostly thanks to markdown) that convey your point. Just some things of the top of my head.

[optimusclimb]

> Indeed so, if judging in a reference frame of gross oversimplifications and dismissing importance of details.

I'll admit, re: IRC - yes, that's a stretch and ignores details. It's more that Slack managed to kick Hipchat's butt so thoroughly that really surprised me.

[snom380]

Do you think they're the exact same products, and that there's absolutely zero reason for anyone to prefer Slack over HipChat?