I think there are good points there about offline participation and archival. I would expect that 99.9% of those on HN have at one time or another found an ans

I think there are good points there about offline participation and archival. I would expect that 99.9% of those on HN have at one time or another found an answer via a direct forum/message list archive or off a google search result returning the same. That will not happen as discussions move to Slack like systems and even if it were, threading would not likely exist. Addressing another point, and though I do use a Slack imitator for a small non-work/non-programming group - an advantage of IRC is that it can be part of many chat clients which handle multiple protocols. Thus I have IRC open with multiple Jabber chats and mucs. Slack et al, at least on the desktop, are space hogs (from those I have seen) and when I am working, space is a premium commodity even with two large displays. The last I checked, IRC integration into Slack is cumbersome and lacking, is this still so?