Disagree. 15+ years ago, people used IRC in real time, to chat and hangout online. Async chat sucks, plus we had forums for that kind of thing. More recently

Disagree. 15+ years ago, people used IRC in real time, to chat and hangout online. Async chat sucks, plus we had forums for that kind of thing. More recently, I've contributed to a number of open source projects that have live chat meetings on IRC. We kept logs of those meetings, but live chat is totally the point.