My social circle on IRC has been consistently growing for years. IRC is not trying to monetize you. It's just trying to connect people. That, more than anything else, is why my friends and I still use it. It's been around for 30 years and I'm confident that it isn't going away any time soon. What other technology has remained relevant for 30 years? IRC is older than HTTP, and only slightly younger than GNU. Only Unix has it beat by more than a year or two.