As someone somewhat related to an IRC project, it's frustrating talking to people who love Slack because most of what they want is something that would be suppo

As someone somewhat related to an IRC project, it's frustrating talking to people who love Slack because most of what they want is something that would be supported in an IRC client - not the IRC protocol. Semi-related: IRCv3 is an advance in the right direction, but I wish they would make huge breaking changes now - instead of introducing new standards to manage a migration to "later IRC". Two things I want to see are IRC encoded as JSON, and TLS-only servers in the standard as a requirement. They added message tags which I think just makes IRC ridiculous to parse - if the objective is to extend IRC and add ancillary data to the message they should just use JSON already. I think it's a bad move to allow some intermittent migration path if we all know the end-game is IRC encoded as JSON. It'd be dirt-simple to autodetect if you're receiving JSON or traditional IRC, too. You don't need a CAP exchange to tell you "oh look, it's gonna be fucking json, m8". An example a feature IRC would need to change for is the ability to edit messages. Slack lets you go back and correct already-submitted messages. You don't have this ability in IRC - and there are ethical reasons to not support it. Personally I'd be in favor of IRC having a command for editing messages, and then clients keeping the entire history of edited messages - so you can always see the original. It's not like the server can take that data back - it's jsut assumed clients would show only the latest, revised version of a message. I could also see having the IRC server support a virtual DCC user to upload files to - so then you could emulate file attachments like you have on Slack. This is something that can be abused though - file uploads are a security and DoS concern. Slack can support certain things because the infrastructure is paid for - with IRC networks it's largely a "free" operation. In the past I've made a "Hookbot" that triggers and POSTs to outside services just like Slack. On some IRC networks there are network-vetted bots you can request in your channel to configure and make use of. You can largely support everything Slack does in existing IRC, we just needs standards to add some coherency and expectations for developers/users. UX does matter, I completely agree with you - IRC needs to change minimally to support those Slack-like features, though. Clients need to change. Most of the draw of Slack is embedding linked items in the chat for convenient viewing. Even icky Mibbit does that :p