IRC used to be amazing, but nobody uses it anymore.
It's attrition.
People got older, had kids, or tech to them simply became a dispassionate job. They didn't have time for the community.
Facebook brought lots of new people to the internet. The sorts of people we connected to online became less technical in aggregate, and we started spending more time on our computers talking to those folks and proportionally less time talking to domain expert nerds. It's zero sum.
Everything became hyper commercial. If you're not making money, why do it? Why spend your time helping people build some other person's commercial product?
The web turned into a proprietary monolith and stopped being cool. It turned into a job. Work at mature tech companies involve so much optimization of small product details that we grow tired of programming as a hobby and don't want to sit through more of it at home. Your coworker is just there for the same paycheck that you get and they're spending the evening zoning out and having fun. Why log onto IRC and chat about technical things when you have to come back and hear your coworkers talk about the great time they're having?
The technical configurability of the past got glossed over with big shiny buttons and flat smartphone UI. It made configuring IRC clients lose its luster. We spend more time on our phones than our desktops or laptops now, anyway.
The proprietary platforms have orders of magnitude more money to make chat look and feel polished.
The new kids aren't learning it. It doesn't look like anything they're familiar with. It looks old and feels crude. There's nobody to carry the torch.
As more people leave, there's less reason to stay.
The fact that this particular site (hackernews) is so popular amongst tech people, without any advertising and with a really basic interface (that people love) is proof that IRC will be very much alive for a lot of years! And that definitely is in line with my experience; for every rather large community there's an IRC channel with great people ready to help.
The technical problems you mention are really non existent with a web client. So it's up to us, the people to say no to proprietary platforms and use it.
That's a rosy view of IRC but not a very accurate description of why people don't use it.
In reality, people's UX standards improved and they weren't going to stick around with a crappy solution like IRC once chat rooms of the late 90s could even figure out how to show you old messages when you logged in.
Something as simple as getting a notification while offline or reading what was said while you had your laptop lid closed are now things expected since over two decades ago. And they're things IRC is still missing unless you're a power user who gets to fix it only for yourself.
IRC never evolved and never cared about UX. And it lost to efforts that did.
That people on HN including you will use phrases like "shiny" and "bells and whistles" to refer to features like a chat that can show you messages you missed while the tram went through a tunnel for 30 seconds is sanctimony that killed IRC.
It's like listening to an engineer struggle to come up with a single non-cynical reason why someone might like a GUI over a CLI. And then when GUIs take off and users finally get more options and stop using the engineer's CLI app, the engineer curses and shakes his fist at VC funding and proprietary tech and blames the users for falling for bells and whistles and being out of touch with the ideal form of software.
(That's actually a far more accurate representation of IRC worship than I intended.)
I grew up with IMs like Yahoo! Messenger and WLM. I tried to use IRC a few times when I was younger and found it impenetrable (a mosaic of text-only boxes that look like a mature emacs configuration -- way before I knew what emacs was -- and immediately greeted by a long wall of text telling me I had to do this and that to post in that server).
My qualms and expectations are indeed very different. For example, fat clients like WLM were more peer to peer, which meant unlimited file transfers, sending voice clips, and uploading custom emotes all for free since they're not sitting on someone's data farming server. I miss that. Thin clients like Discord are of course more profitable but are more limited/onerous even as you're paying a subscription like Nitro to be able to bump up your file transfer to 100 MB and use custom emotes (despite the great UX).
All these issues are already solved by some IRC clients, such as Quassel, The Lounge, or IRCCloud. Matrix clients such as Riot/Element as well, as they can access IRC.
Lots of people want to use discord (or any other mainstream commercial chat service) for their programming communities. The problem with that are the enormous masses of people that use discord for everything else and when they want to learn programming its a lot easy to pop by in the discord server and ask why their code doesn't work.
It's different with IRC, because setting it up and learning its ways is not completely trivial. It's about 2 google searches away, just like the fix for that simple compile error that needs fixing. Those that are patient enough for that are usually the ones patient enough to fix their syntax errors themselves. And when you think about it - being patient and able to fix your errors for yourself is exactly the prerequisite a beginner needs for their attempt to learn how to program.
This, and the fact that a lot of hardcore FLOSS contributors refuse to use proprietary platforms for development of their software makes Freenode a very nice place to discuss programming.
IRC used to be amazing, but nobody uses it anymore.
It's attrition.
People got older, had kids, or tech to them simply became a dispassionate job. They didn't have time for the community.
Facebook brought lots of new people to the internet. The sorts of people we connected to online became less technical in aggregate, and we started spending more time on our computers talking to those folks and proportionally less time talking to domain expert nerds. It's zero sum.
Everything became hyper commercial. If you're not making money, why do it? Why spend your time helping people build some other person's commercial product?
The web turned into a proprietary monolith and stopped being cool. It turned into a job. Work at mature tech companies involve so much optimization of small product details that we grow tired of programming as a hobby and don't want to sit through more of it at home. Your coworker is just there for the same paycheck that you get and they're spending the evening zoning out and having fun. Why log onto IRC and chat about technical things when you have to come back and hear your coworkers talk about the great time they're having?
The technical configurability of the past got glossed over with big shiny buttons and flat smartphone UI. It made configuring IRC clients lose its luster. We spend more time on our phones than our desktops or laptops now, anyway.
The proprietary platforms have orders of magnitude more money to make chat look and feel polished.
The new kids aren't learning it. It doesn't look like anything they're familiar with. It looks old and feels crude. There's nobody to carry the torch.
As more people leave, there's less reason to stay.
RIP, IRC.