[darkpuma]

IRC bots are trivial to implement and run so I don't consider many of these, which are commonly provided by IRC bots, as legitimate arguments against IRC. I don't consider "but you need a bot" to be a legitimate gripe.

Rich text is generally worthless except for code highlighting, but pasting large amounts of code into the channel is generally considered antisocial on IRC anyway, and pastebin services are used for this. It's not unusual for a company to provide their own internal pastebin services anyway, since it's generally useful with other systems like email. Ditto file sharing.

> "Oh come on can we drop the cat pictures trope?"

No, because in my personal experience that is OVERWHELMINGLY the most frequently used feature of slack/etc that's not present in IRC. For every time I've seen pasted code, I've seen easily a hundred inane pasted memes. I wouldn't bring it up if I didn't earnestly believe it's the primary reason people prefer systems other than IRC.