[rs23296008n1]

I wouldnt recommend staying away. That implies the whole thing has no value. I've used it and found it ok for what it is. The tumbleweed effect of no-one around hits me due to timezones. That is a bigger negative to me.

My experience with freenode was similar to other forums. But I'd never be surprised by an online forum containing aholes. It almost necessary as part of a diverse ecosystem. How the forum deals with the bad is the real measure. That's hard when the admin is the part of that bad.

I prefer Discord for actual online group tasks because just about everything is better for our group's usecases, especially voice chat, bots, history, images, video etc. Being text only, IRC is less useful now in comparison.