[Mithaldu]

As a counterpoint: I am in 78 IRC channels. I've never seen slack mentioned anywhere aside from here on hackernews. I suspect it's not actually converting any long-time users, but only being an effective draw on people who like the new and shiny.

[owenwil]

Right, but this is kind of the point. Because Slack is more approachable for the masses, it wins in these scenarios. It doesn't need to convince the longtime IRC users to move across, just the ones that see barrier to entry on IRC as enough of an issue to make the switch. Exactly what happened in Wordpress' situation, it seems.

[chaosfactor]

I am a long time IRC user and I have been hanging out in the digital nomads slack channel. I've also used Slack at a couple of jobs.

Slack has nifty features like integration with tools, and inline gifs, etc. But the really nice thing is that it feels a little more human. Everyone knows that IRC turns people into jerks. Slack won't completely prevent that, but it does help to promote the feeling of community. It's made for teams, so it's kind of designed around it.

[koffiezet]

Slack is pretty neat to communicate with less tech-minded people, it is very accessible. And it has an IRC adapter, 90% of my interaction with slack is in irssi, the rest is on mobile.

[EC1]

It'd be neat if there was a modern app for desktop/mobile that leveraged IRC fully as well. Then you'd have a killer.