Chat wasn't as much of an issue when the UI was boring. IRC was boring and people used it mostly when they needed to. Slack is made by a former gaming company

Chat wasn't as much of an issue when the UI was boring. IRC was boring and people used it mostly when they needed to. Slack is made by a former gaming company that understands how to make chat more psychologically addictive and appealing. Our devs said, "You can take slack from our cold dead hands." We've had emoji wars, integration wars and so on. Slack is not for chat.