In 15 years as a professional software engineer, I’ve never worked somewhere that wasn’t heavily using IRC, Hipchat, or Slack. The conversations are identical, the only thing that has changed is the service being used. As previous poster alluded to, your complaints aren’t a Slack issue, it’s a co-worker issue.
The nice thing about pre-Slack was that there was a bozo filter: the only people who could bother you were the people who could figure out how to use an IRC client.
Also 15 years professional here; And I agree, it's largely similar.
One difference though is that IRC doesn't have a @here equivalent. People do like to overuse that one in particular. (you can turn it off but the default is frustrating and the UX is poor for disabling)
