I pay $50/year to irccloud.com just for some of those features.
One major problem with IRC is that nobody else does. Just a few other nerds are running irssi on a VPS. It's hard to grow a community when everyone is offline as soon as they close their laptop.
Compare that to all of the out of the box conveniences of Slack/Discord, there's no contest.
>everyone is offline as soon as they close their laptop
That's the killer app for Slack. Not images or emoji or gifs or file transfer, that's just icing on the cake. The killer is that everyone is "online" even if they're offline. As long as your message isn't time sensitive, you can fire it off and when the person logs back in they will see it.
Everyone who says Slack is just IRC is ignoring the fact that IRC doesn't allow you to chat with people who are offline. That's the game changer.
One major problem with IRC is that nobody else does. Just a few other nerds are running irssi on a VPS. It's hard to grow a community when everyone is offline as soon as they close their laptop.
Compare that to all of the out of the box conveniences of Slack/Discord, there's no contest.