[Kiro]

No-one complained when projects had IRC channels/servers, which are even worse since they have no history at all.

[callalex]

At least people treat IRC as ephemeral and place all documentation elsewhere. People are writing whole wikis inside of Discord that are not publicly searchable.

[Gormo]

Good projects still do rely on IRC -- Libera.chat is full of proper channels -- and logging bots are ubiquitous.

[Kiro]

And you never hear anyone complaining about those. "Locking knowledge" was never an argument before and it's not now.

[okasaki]

All IRC clients have local plain text logging and putting a .txt on a web server is trivial.

[Kiro]

Local logging doesn't help much for searchability when you're new and it requires you to be online 24/7. Anyway, that's beside the point. Even if IRC had built-in server history it still has the same problems but I never saw people being outraged about it.