The Internet dies a little every time someone starts a new Slack channel. I'm glad for the SPOF reminder.
Can you imagine how many copy-pasted certs, passwords, and CC# would be hoovered up were Slack compromised?
And all of the things that people use to make IRC more bearable are problems in their own right. Imagine a vulnerability with the znc bouncer? Tons and tons of people compromised right there. irccloud down? Oops. and so on.
Namely, archived chats and in-chat images.
I stopped using both USENET and IRC long before any of these alternatives appeared.
Yeah, Slack is down... but the gains made from using it outweigh the pain of having to deal with the failure. Improve the less proprietary options to where this isn't true anymore and people will stop using the more proprietary options.
There are always trade-offs, and expecting people not to make them is unrealistic.
If you don't care about UX then you don't care about UX, but at least have the intellectual honesty to say it.
But on the topic of UX and what are or are not losing, I will say that the UX of slack is not so good when it eats 2gb of memory all day and beachballs a modern day iMac quite badly if you have a channel with lots of fancy formatting.
I have written to slack about this and they wrote a polite response back acknowledging the issue. Really hope they do solve this soon (Despite the connectivity issues) because it's become unusable for my team lately. Supposedly according to slack it is compounded when you have multiple teams.
We have a team per client as we primarily do consulting, so now we have had to switch some teams over to another solution so that we can allow the teams that must be in slack to stay in slack.
So, while I think slack has the potential to be much better in every single way, days like today illustrate that it's an SPOF, and on days when it is available, I would not call the experience reliably good, not as reliably good as modern day IRC is, unfortunately. (and I don't say this lightly, i love things like in-line code blocks, @ notifying people, mobile clients, and more)
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.