It may depend a lot on the IRC network and channel. IRC these days seems to be confined to open-source software discussion, so the communities are more helpful.
This was on freenode, on the channel for a development tool. I'm not going to name names because the people involved weren't actually members of the project IIRC, just regulars on the channel.
It wasn't nasty or anything, just... weird. It gave me an overpowering urge to uninstall irssi and go outside.
