[zimbatm]

The article doesn't talk about the best feature of Slack: a consistent message history for all the users. In IRC messages can easily get lost due to network splits or client disappearing. Not having everyone with the same message timeline can make some conversations quite awkward.

This is really the only feature I miss in IRC.

[nayuki]

In exchange, you have gut-wrenching systemwide outages of Slack once in a while. The CAP theorem says you can't have it both ways. News from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303479

[chipotle_coyote]

There are many ways in which I prefer IRC to Slack, and I agree with Sir_Cmpwn's general premise that some of Slack's features are more trouble than they're worth. (Slack's threaded replies are definitely one of them, and while I've seen better implementations in IRC-like systems, "just don't thread replies" is so far the best implementation I've seen.) But the problem you're describing here is arguably one of Slack's advantages, not a disadvantage.

[deadbunny]

Are you living in a world without netsplits?

[ryanlol]

Netsplits are pretty rare these days.

[clarry]

Yeah? I just counted six netsplits in the past 24 hours that affected a channel I'm on on IRCnet.

I still love IRC. My second home.

[ryanlol]

This is because of IRCnet is operated by multiple entities and has rather peculiar links, other networks are not like this.

http://dx.fi/alt/ircmap/fdp.png here’s a map of IRCnet, they’re really going out of their way to generate netsplits.

A network operated by a single entity doesn’t need such a silly amount of nodes, you can support hundreds of thousands of IRC uses on a single server.

[chrismorgan]

I have experienced symptoms far worse than netsplit on Slack on at least four occasions in two and a half years of usage for work, with messages getting lost, duplicated and reordered, differently in different clients, and generally with no obvious indication that things are broken, unlike with netsplit where you’d see a bunch of parts/quits signalling the problem. Eventually it decides on what I hope is a consistent history, but even that only works because the clients are slaves to the server and don’t cache things.

[ohithereyou]

I don't want a coherent message history. Nicknames not being 'owned' by anybody (on servers that don't implement services) and incoherence of message histories means that deniability is still alive and well in real time communications.

In an increasingly surveillance filled Internet, the fact that what I've said in the past can't be held against me today is a feature, not a bug.