With Slack, an organization can put a link on their website, and users can click it and be taken more-or-less straight to that organization's chat.
With irc, yes you can post a link to Kiwi, but then, to actually get connected to that organization's chat, you need to navigate a somewhat confusing configuration dialog that includes, among other things, two different server selection controls, one of which is a dropdown list of maybe 200 different options, and a number of buttons with jargon names, none of which is, to an uninitiated IRC user, obviously the one to take you to the chat, and some of which are prone to doing flat-out nothing when you click on them. The one they do want, which they probably won't click because the UI is laid out to make it look like it's only for advanced users, tends to give useless error messages if you get some configuration wrong, anyway. Which someone new to IRC is likely to do, because the form is confusing and provides no guidance or validation.
So, not only is it quite a few more steps than "go to webpage, click button, now you're chatting", but several of those additional ones are liable to cause people to give up.
A now-deleted comment in this thread said that they like irc because it keeps less technical people away, which they felt improved the quality of discussions. Regardless of one's opinion of that sentiment, I think that the effect in question is undeniably real, and it perhaps creates a situation where avid IRC users have a tendency to lose track of what counts as acceptable user experience for the rest of the world.
>With Slack, an organization can put a link on their website, and users can click it and be taken more-or-less straight to that organization's chat.
This is not at all my experience with slack.
>yes you can post a link to Kiwi,
It's been a while since I tried setting it up but IIRC you can post links to kiwi with parameters which skips the configuration dialog and just asks for a nickname then dumps you into the channel. It's not really possible to improve on that.
With Slack, an organization can put a link on their website, and users can click it and be taken more-or-less straight to that organization's chat.
With irc, yes you can post a link to Kiwi, but then, to actually get connected to that organization's chat, you need to navigate a somewhat confusing configuration dialog that includes, among other things, two different server selection controls, one of which is a dropdown list of maybe 200 different options, and a number of buttons with jargon names, none of which is, to an uninitiated IRC user, obviously the one to take you to the chat, and some of which are prone to doing flat-out nothing when you click on them. The one they do want, which they probably won't click because the UI is laid out to make it look like it's only for advanced users, tends to give useless error messages if you get some configuration wrong, anyway. Which someone new to IRC is likely to do, because the form is confusing and provides no guidance or validation.
So, not only is it quite a few more steps than "go to webpage, click button, now you're chatting", but several of those additional ones are liable to cause people to give up.
A now-deleted comment in this thread said that they like irc because it keeps less technical people away, which they felt improved the quality of discussions. Regardless of one's opinion of that sentiment, I think that the effect in question is undeniably real, and it perhaps creates a situation where avid IRC users have a tendency to lose track of what counts as acceptable user experience for the rest of the world.