Everything in this post except the personal sentiment could be about any semi-anonymous text based communication medium, be it mailing lists, web forums or any other chat system with group chats / channels.
As somebody who has been on irc for over 20 years now, and shares most of the sentiment, I still wouldn't invest into the tech. As others have written, the protocol simply isn't adequate for today's usage scenarios.
This is a problem that people have been fighting with some success on xmpp, which is far more flexible and is a superset of what irc provides, and there are the obvious web stack based solutions like Slack, Matrix and Mattermost.
Still, people rather use Facebook groups today, and we won't convert them by making irc better.
As somebody who has been on irc for over 20 years now, and shares most of the sentiment, I still wouldn't invest into the tech. As others have written, the protocol simply isn't adequate for today's usage scenarios.
This is a problem that people have been fighting with some success on xmpp, which is far more flexible and is a superset of what irc provides, and there are the obvious web stack based solutions like Slack, Matrix and Mattermost.
Still, people rather use Facebook groups today, and we won't convert them by making irc better.