I really do not understand why people become so emotional when this subject is raised. It's not like the comments are personal or vindictive.
It has to be said that whilst IRC is not dying, it is certainly not as popular as it once was. There are several clear reasons for this.
1. Instant messengers: There's at least four popular messenger services, certainly four that I am aware of. These have more features that new Internet users may find useful. Hardened long-term IRC users like me don't like messengers and my reasoning has always been why have more than one text-based real time chat programme? To me it doesn't make sense but to others it's all good.
2. Social networking: There's not only Twitter and Facebook. There's dozens of popular social networking sites. Some have live chat and others don't but again, new Internet users will find these sites appealing, especially the younger crowd that don't like being lectured by opers on an IRC network. Most of these places allow users to control things like spam and abuse themselves and this alone would make them more popular even before opening a discussion on the many extra features available.
3. IRC is old and very reliable, probably more reliable than any other Internet communications protocol and this reliability comes about due to simplicity. There's bugger-all features by comparison to newer technologies but to a lot of people that is a good thing. IRC is a real time chat protocol, nothing more, nothing less and that is the way it should stay, popular or not.
4. Bad experiences on IRC have driven people away. Many (certainly not all) networks have been hamstrung by poor customer relations, foul-tempered/corrupt opers, allowing politics and bitterness get in the way of what really matters.
5. IRC networks don't make money for their owners, try as many have. Running an IRC server never generates a return on investment. There is no practical way of generating income from running IRC despite any good network running IRC on professional equipment costing thousands of dollars.
IRC does have a loyal stronghold, no doubt about that. Included in that group is myself. Do I believe that IRC's popularity is waning? Yes I do. Instead of looking at the statistics of one network as some have done in this thread, wouldn't it be more accurate to look at the whole picture over the last, say, ten years? Quakenet's staggering but short-term popularity grew out of the failure of Dalnet to drop a lid on the morons flooding their network. I'm not suggesting this is the only reason but that event did have significance. Let's face it - the combined population of the top 100 networks in the last ten years has fallen dramatically.
I don't think IRC will die, certainly not in the foreseeable future however it is not as popular as it once was and that popularity is unlikely to return.
