[tptacek]

This is a pretty silly comparison, because the web is changing so fast that people regularly express concern that it's evolving too quickly.

IRCv3, meanwhile, hardly changes IRC at all.

There's no indication from the IRC standards work that IRC is heading in the direction that people who use Slack need it to go: it's not going to index channels, it's not going to allow long message lines, it's not going to deliver previous messages to users who join channels, &c &c.