First, IRC isn't easy for newbies. I tried to adopt it at the first tech company I worked for, and our support folks had a lot of trouble getting the basics down. There could be a client that makes things easier, but I've never seen one as easy as Slack.
Second, IRC alone doesn't provide a bunch of features that everyone expects nowadays. You have to host or pay for a bouncer if you want to see what was said when you were offline, for example. Gotta use a 3rd party service for push notifications on iOS. Again, there's no reason why this couldn't exist, but it's another product, not just IRC.
> IRC isn't easy for newbies. I tried to adopt it at the first tech company I worked for, and our support folks had a lot of trouble getting the basics down. There could be a client that makes things easier, but I've never seen one as easy as Slack.
Years ago, I started out with mIRC on Windows 95. I didn't know many IRC commands, but as I recall, you could navigate through the menus to do things like list channels, join them, part from them, etc. So, I don't think that an application like that should be any more difficult to use compared to Slack.
Second, IRC alone doesn't provide a bunch of features that everyone expects nowadays. You have to host or pay for a bouncer if you want to see what was said when you were offline, for example. Gotta use a 3rd party service for push notifications on iOS. Again, there's no reason why this couldn't exist, but it's another product, not just IRC.