Comment by dragontamer
5 years ago
I mean, a lot of developers used IRC as far back as I can remember?
Forums are newer than IRC chat, though arguably Forums are based on USENET, BBS, or email-lists.
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IRC / Discord / Slack / Skype are real-time communication / instant messenger style communications.
Email / Forums / USENET / Reddit / Digg / Slashdot / Hacker News are async and slow.
Note the (d)evolution here. IRC was an open standard, with numerous client and server implementations. The other chat apps are all bespoke proprietary solutions. Ditto with email/NNTP vs other async options.
IRC adoption never really peaked like slack and discord has
More importantly, I don't recall IRC ever replacing mailing lists / newsgroups / forums. People generally knew when to use either one appropriately. But these days, it's not uncommon to see a project page straight up saying that if you have any questions, Discord is it.