I participate less in channels but 1-on-1 chats with colleagues I work with is indispensable. I am an old hat, I have been online for 25 years (OK, it'll be 25 on September 2, fine, yes I am part of the Eternal September cohort). But I have never seen any app, talk, ICQ, AOL, MSN, Skype, you name it, I tried it, I used it which made this so easy. Discussion and code separates, inserting images and longer code snippets are trivial. Remember the IRC rule of not pasting more than three lines and pastebinning the rest? And now it has video and voice which works, just like that.

And part of the hype might be how easy it is to add emojis and have a little fun. It's important, too.