[cahoot_bird]

For better or worse, other platforms such as Slack, Discord, and Gitter have beaten IRC in attracting new programmers.

While IRC is a little more open as a protocol, the reality is it lacks the features these other platforms provide in attracting new visitors. In my observation this might include: Mobile support, being able to see past messages, emoji, embeded video/gif, having a company maintain and add features, and being somewhat less anonymous.

I doubt IRC networks such as freenode will disappear anytime in the near future, but I doubt it will grow much either given the alternatives.

[wlesieutre]

People often bring up that you can set up a persistent relay to give you message history on your mobile device, which is accurate in the same way that you don’t need Dropbox because you can just rsync a folder with your server.

Technically true, but not going to get mass adoption against more convenient alternatives.