For me, what killed IRC was the use of Bouncers. Once they became popular, channels would morph from having 20-30 actively-online users at anyone one time to ha

For me, what killed IRC was the use of Bouncers. Once they became popular, channels would morph from having 20-30 actively-online users at anyone one time to having 200+ 'disconnected' users who weren't really there. So without any sort of 'presence' indicators, there'd be no indication of who was actually online. So the experience went from real-time chat, to something like a feature-less forum, where'd you'd post a question and then wait for hours/days before someone actually replied (if you ever got a reply at all, despite the number of 'listed' users). So channels just became a idling wasteland of ghost users, which is why I think a large majority of casual IRC users jumped ship to other chat platforms. Now, if everyone just accepted that they don't actually need a bouncer, and understand that like a room in real life, that when you are not in the room you are not part of the rooms conversation, IRC would feel much more 'alive' and people would start using it properly again.