Oh man, all of those things are so convenient once you start using them. If you've never used them, great, irc is probably fine. For me, I could never ever go back to irc, having gotten accustomed to all that stuff on slack.
For example, want to share a screenshot? Hit print screen to capture it, click to the browser, click to the tab, hit ctrl-v to paste, done. Instead of, what, uploading an image to an image-sharing site? I wouldn't even know how to do that at this point.
For future reference in case you need to share a screenshot elsewhere... It's literally the same process to post a screenshot to imgur. No account needed.
I am a big fan of greenshot. It takes over the print screen button. You then draw a box around the area you want to capture and then you can select to copy to clip board or open it in the sketching portion or even upload direct to imgur where it then puts the URL of the file in your clipboard.