[stjohnswarts]

The young peeps like their icons and colors and gifs. Old people are always dying off and young people who turn into old people tend to bring their toys along with them, so I forsee something like slack/discord but OSS taking over in the next 10 years, at least in programming circles.

[Avamander]

Please, having an usable, secure IRC setup is quite annoying, nothing to do with "icons and colors and gifs" (but difficulty at viewing that content in IRC clients could be counted as a negative). Also, some of the most active channels on a few IRC networks are primarily ~20-30yo people, maybe there are older-people channels but I suspect there's a few barriers at getting access to those.