From a business perspective, this is incredibly stupid, as they‘re basically abandoning their early, nerdy adopters who brought them into companies in the first

From a business perspective, this is incredibly stupid, as they‘re basically abandoning their early, nerdy adopters who brought them into companies in the first place. It‘s a big „fuck you, now that we‘re a REAL COMPANY“, we don‘t need you anymore. It’s also a bad sign on who has taken charge and what the culture is like by now. If they had REALLY wanted, nothing of this would have been impossible. If you can‘t secure a weak or weird protocol, just go down the route Google did with the Cloud SQL proxy and tunnel it. There‘s no big complication connecting to a localhost gateway instead that handles all the authentication and encryption - we‘re talking about a nerdcore audience anyway. FWIW, I don‘t give much about IRC and love Slack as is, but I still can‘t believe they‘re acting this nearsighted.