Which of course misses the point of why people use Slack over IRC: history without screwing about. I could make do without the emojis, GIFs, video or other content rendering if IRC had history without the need for a constant connection.

>Which of course misses the point of why people use Slack over IRC: history without screwing about.

It's why you use Slack, rather than why people use Slack. I'm sure you could make do without the emojis, GIFs, and videos, but the market says people seem to think otherwise.

To be fair, why he uses Slack is likely due to his employer using Slack.

And the reason his employer uses it is to ensure everyone can interrupt everyone and give each other more work.

Is there a competitor that doesn't have the emojis/gifs/videos? They're easy enough that everyone adds them, so I don't think we can conclude "the market" has made a clear choice.

(Ok, I remember HipChat didn't have gifs but there was a lot else wrong with HipChat)

Those who think Slack is just IRC are the same ones who have been predicting the year of the Linux desktop

And who think Dropbox is just rsync + crontab.

Yea except I'm neither of these people but good job on the strawman arguments.

Slack is nicer than IRC to use. Nobody here is debating that. Slack solves a heap of problems with IRC.

My only point of contention is that there is zero argument for it using the resources it does. None of the mentioned solutions require any more resources than IRC consumes.

We just have a big heaping pile of electron nobody wants to acknowledge as the source of the problem.

I skipped this because the history and search are perceivably done server side

Of course ?

Yes it often makes sense to produce inefficient code for many business reasons (development speed, users don't care, easier platform to deploy to, etc).

However what Slack does would be nowhere near taxing for a modern computer if it were to be done remotely efficiently.

I also use Telegram's desktop app. I wouldn't call it lightweight, but it has the features you list without the resource demands of electron. Dash is currently using more memory on my laptop.