[Vulture]

In the glory days of IRC, everyone was using it. Now most social medias have replaced the need for it. I think that what really killed IRC was msn/icq, specialised and targeted chat instead of meeting random people (which is quite hard to do these days).

IRC was the precursor to many specific stuff that later gave whole industries. Stuff like online dating didn't exist, interest groups like #linux or regional chatrooms like #Montreal. I think that jabber rose during the fall of IRC but they didn't manage to catch the fleeing users since their service is quite similar to what people were leaving. Since the web caught on online dating and such, IRC and jabber became less and less interesting for most of their former users.