Discord is where everyone is, but it's so awful just trying to ask a question I almost never get anything out of it. You ask a question and people talk over you and ignore it because it's too "hard".
The only community on Discord I've found that's actually helpful is the Rust server. I love Rust.
IRC used to be amazing, but nobody uses it anymore.
It's attrition.
People got older, had kids, or tech to them simply became a dispassionate job. They didn't have time for the community.
Facebook brought lots of new people to the internet. The sorts of people we connected to online became less technical in aggregate, and we started spending more time on our computers talking to those folks and proportionally less time talking to domain expert nerds. It's zero sum.
Everything became hyper commercial. If you're not making money, why do it? Why spend your time helping people build some other person's commercial product?
The web turned into a proprietary monolith and stopped being cool. It turned into a job. Work at mature tech companies involve so much optimization of small product details that we grow tired of programming as a hobby and don't want to sit through more of it at home. Your coworker is just there for the same paycheck that you get and they're spending the evening zoning out and having fun. Why log onto IRC and chat about technical things when you have to come back and hear your coworkers talk about the great time they're having?
The technical configurability of the past got glossed over with big shiny buttons and flat smartphone UI. It made configuring IRC clients lose its luster. We spend more time on our phones than our desktops or laptops now, anyway.
The proprietary platforms have orders of magnitude more money to make chat look and feel polished.
The new kids aren't learning it. It doesn't look like anything they're familiar with. It looks old and feels crude. There's nobody to carry the torch.
As more people leave, there's less reason to stay.
RIP, IRC.
In reality, people's UX standards improved and they weren't going to stick around with a crappy solution like IRC once chat rooms of the late 90s could even figure out how to show you old messages when you logged in.
Something as simple as getting a notification while offline or reading what was said while you had your laptop lid closed are now things expected since over two decades ago. And they're things IRC is still missing unless you're a power user who gets to fix it only for yourself.
IRC never evolved and never cared about UX. And it lost to efforts that did.
That people on HN including you will use phrases like "shiny" and "bells and whistles" to refer to features like a chat that can show you messages you missed while the tram went through a tunnel for 30 seconds is sanctimony that killed IRC.
It's like listening to an engineer struggle to come up with a single non-cynical reason why someone might like a GUI over a CLI. And then when GUIs take off and users finally get more options and stop using the engineer's CLI app, the engineer curses and shakes his fist at VC funding and proprietary tech and blames the users for falling for bells and whistles and being out of touch with the ideal form of software.
(That's actually a far more accurate representation of IRC worship than I intended.)
My qualms and expectations are indeed very different. For example, fat clients like WLM were more peer to peer, which meant unlimited file transfers, sending voice clips, and uploading custom emotes all for free since they're not sitting on someone's data farming server. I miss that. Thin clients like Discord are of course more profitable but are more limited/onerous even as you're paying a subscription like Nitro to be able to bump up your file transfer to 100 MB and use custom emotes (despite the great UX).
An older person's IRC is my WLM. xD
The technical problems you mention are really non existent with a web client. So it's up to us, the people to say no to proprietary platforms and use it.
Lots of people want to use discord (or any other mainstream commercial chat service) for their programming communities. The problem with that are the enormous masses of people that use discord for everything else and when they want to learn programming its a lot easy to pop by in the discord server and ask why their code doesn't work.
It's different with IRC, because setting it up and learning its ways is not completely trivial. It's about 2 google searches away, just like the fix for that simple compile error that needs fixing. Those that are patient enough for that are usually the ones patient enough to fix their syntax errors themselves. And when you think about it - being patient and able to fix your errors for yourself is exactly the prerequisite a beginner needs for their attempt to learn how to program.
This, and the fact that a lot of hardcore FLOSS contributors refuse to use proprietary platforms for development of their software makes Freenode a very nice place to discuss programming.
I haven't been on the Rust server but I'd guess that one reason it's useful is because your typical Rust developer already knows how to code and isn't a complete newbie. So you end up having conversation between seasoned developers who know how to read docs and can figure out basic syntax on their own.
There is also a community run server but I don’t know its URL offhand.
I sometimes have a phase where I answer a couple of questions. Usually because at that time I have nothing better to do and get the enjoyment that I could spare someone else the frustration of figuring out something obscure by themselves, just like a random blog post or SO answer helped me with a problem.
So I suggest to always respond with at least a little "Thanks!" or something if you found such answers helpful - it shows the other person that their contribution wasn't a waste of time and was kind of meaningful for at least one other user. Helps greatly with motivation.