The "modern" answer is "don't do that". There is a time to play social games, there is a time to do what you are doing, and you should spend some time talking to yourself too.
Thus the success of discord.
The answers to changing user tastes is not to proclaim their tastes are wrong. That's the attitude displayed by a lot of IRC server operators and prolific IRC users, and it's that refusal to adapt that's driving IRC into obsolescence.
Maybe those people are ok with an ever-dwindling userbase, and if so that's great. But I'd like to see a Renaissance of IRC to the detriment of proprietary walled gardens like slack and Discord.
While I think it could have been said better, we all need to quit feeling the need to have everything so perfectly connected all the time and feeling frustration when our tech gets in the way.