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Was reading old discussions about why did Slack win out over IRC (for some definition of win?)
https://tedium.co/2017/10/17/irc-vs-slack-chat-history/
Found these quotes interesting.
"Why is it, out of all the prominent internet protocols in use during the early ’90s, only two of them—email and the World Wide Web—have managed to hold on in a way where most people use them on a regular basis" -- Ernie Smith 2017
"Why did slack win?
Because whenever somebody asked for:
* 24/7 presence, the reply was "you can do that with a bouncer"
* backlog, the reply was "you can do that with a bouncer"
* full text search, the reply was "that's up to the client implementation"
* file sharing, the reply was "it's already possible with XDCC"
and so on and so forth.
Basically, it's not that Slack is great, it's because IRC as a whole just refused to adapt to what users actually wanted/needed." -- em6m 2020
Not saying I agree exactly, just interesting.
@randomwizard Kind of striking how this article doesn't mention Discord at all, which seems to be what *really* ate IRC's lunch.
I tend to believe that programmer geeks solved a lot of problems in the early internet; irc, email, usenet, webservers, and more
But regular people did not want to deal with what was created. They always gravitated to some commercial offering.
personal website -> facebook
irc -> slack, discord
usenet -> twitter, reddit
email -> google gmail
web apps -> personal phone apps
Why? The things that come to mind are; ease of use and eventually network effect.
All the negatives of using a commercial service just do not register to the normal users; privacy invasion, lock-in, monetization, ads.
@randomwizard @pteryx "... and more" includes security. All the basic problems of security have been solved, except for the one where you have to follow all the complicated rules precisely or it fails.
As in automobile design, the part that usually fails first is the nut holding the wheel.
Commercial offerings often added "security" as an afterthought. It needs to be built in from day 1, you can't just patch it