This is an astonishingly bad take
It's also full of lies and it's comparing apples to oranges
People shit talk each other behind their backs on IRC all the time
In fact, I'm probably going to shit talk this take on IRC
@Elizafox as someone that's used IRC for a decade and is an IRCop of a reasonably sized server
how can one take be this wrong
@KS @Elizafox What the actual frig is this person talking about? IRC is literally the wild west of social interaction (there's a reason why I left it after years and years of being a regular on Freenode [old enough to have spoken to Lilo]). You can't *GET* more libertarian than IRC.
Regarding its claim to being healthier: maybe, maybe not. That's a deeply subjective attribute unless you're willing to define your metrics ahead of time AND get everyone to agree on them as being definitional.
@KS @Elizafox Most people who I mention IRC to today either assume one of two things: corporate internal IRC which is well-insulated, well-managed from the public networks; or, Freenode.
OR, they'll say, "Eww, IRC? You should move to Slack." Hehehe.
I'm still waiting for my chance to throw up a Citadel BBS instance and use that for internal communications. It's a near perfect fit for that use-case, in my opinion. Oh well.