I didn't even bother reading the article after reading the headline. As you pointed out, IRC was far from a failure. Even with the coming and going of all sort

I didn't even bother reading the article after reading the headline. As you pointed out, IRC was far from a failure. Even with the coming and going of all sorts of realtime chat networks in the 1990s and 2000s, IRC still maintained vibrant stable communities of users. Freenode was a great more modern example. It's succeeded through a whole variety of what one could more reasonably consider 'fad' technologies.