Slack's bait and switch
With all the (appropriate) smugness of &quot;I told you so&quot; surrounding this issue, I think that many people&#x27;s attitude around sticking to IRC and mail is a reason why something like slack could even take off so quickly.<p>I regularly speak to people like that, who just plain refuse (are unable?) to even see the difference between a chat like slack (or telegram, or mattermost, or or or...) where I can post images&#x2F;videos inline, use proper markup etc, and a combination of IRC and email.
&quot;But you can just send images by mail!&quot; they shout. Yes, you can. But the user experience will be a different one. And it doesn&#x27;t even matter that I <i>personally</i> prefer the slack-like UX.
Many other people seem to prefer it too, that&#x27;s what matters.
For anyone who&#x27;s only mildly technical, setting up IRC is only a small hurdle, but it&#x27;s one of many.<p>IMHO, if you want people to use anything else but slack, sticking your head in the sand and screaming &quot;you can do all of that in IRC&quot; won&#x27;t get you anywhere and is equivalent to complaining about the very nature of humanity. It might feel good to scream out your weltschmerz, but it won&#x27;t change anything.