If you don't care about UX then you don't care about UX, but at least have the intellectual honesty to say it. I care about UX. What I don't care for is the i

If you don't care about UX then you don't care about UX, but at least have the intellectual honesty to say it. I care about UX. What I don't care for is the idea the UX has become a distance multiplier when talking about differences in software. Is anyone suggesting that Slack is literally just a client for the existing IRC protocol? No. They're suggesting that slack is just a particularly nice and popular iteration on IRC. You seem to have some impression that just because a slack feature isn't part of the IRC protocol, that it isn't a short evolutionary distance from IRC. Breed in some modern design conventions and use paradigms and you're pretty close. So it's not crazy to call slack IRC, it's a convenient shorthand for people who don't demand exacting terminology (and don't mind mentioning slack in the same breath as an icky ugly fixed with text-only app). And that intellectual dishonesty comment is just a way to say a really shitty thing and fly it under dang's radar.