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Benjamin Pollack has blogged about why he hates the proprietary chat tool, Slack, which competes with IRC. He covers six points as to why you should too:
"Yeah, that’s right: there’s finally something I feel so negatively about that I’m unsatisfied hating it all by myself; I want you to hate it, too. So let’s talk about why Slack is destroying your life, piece by piece, and why you should get rid of it immediately before its trail of destruction widens any further—in other words, while you still have time to stop the deluge of mindless addiction that it’s already staple-gunned to your life."
[Ed. addition] I had troubles accessing the site, even wget failed to download anything... but lynx.exe on Windows 7 Pro worked on the first try!?! For the curious, here are the six points from the blog post alluded to above:
1. It encourages use for both time-sensitive and time-insensitive communication
2. It cannot be sanely ignored
3. It cannot be sanely organized
4. It's proprietary and encourages lock-in
5. Its version of Markdown is just broken
6. It encourages use for both business and personal applications
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday July 09 2017, @02:11PM
Worth noting: Ryver is more-or-less a Slack clone.
To point 5: Both Slack and Ryver have failed to provide more than the most basic content formatting, either direct or via incoming webhook.
I've written code that works with both; basically the mindset of both companies is "we don't care what you need to do; do it our (very limited) way."
Which is why we're not considering using either of them any more. When you can't format your data adequately for all your users, you should really be using something else anyway. Protip: This stuff isn't difficult to write for the web. Phone apps... perhaps. OTOH, the phones have web browsers, so...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I do, however, take issue with the 1/3/6 points: "time-sensitive vs not/it cannot be sanely organized/personal-business dual use." You can create separate Slacks or Ryvers, and channels with separate membership controls, and see to it that they are used well. If they are not used well, you don't have a "Slack" or "Ryver" problem. You have a management problem.