Sounds like you might be blaming a protocol for some poor channel choices.

There are still plenty of educational/social IRC communities that welcome curious people of all skill levels.

I can vouch for https://hashbang.sh (irc.hashbang.sh/6697) which has piles of industry leaders as regulars that prefer investing in open federated standards for internet communication over the endless array of hip walled garden flavor of the week chat systems.

We give out free bouncers/shells to anyone too :)

I concur. I've learned a lot listening and participating in chat rooms, but not all of them are the same. Some are definitely toxic, some are uplifting -- intellectually or otherwise. My personal recipe is once I have a topic in mind, I browse through the channel list, filtering by popularity. In my experience, "toxicity", for the lack of a better term, is proportional to popularity (crowdedness) and mainstreamness. In practical terms, if a channel has a lot of members (150+) that's not a good sign. If it's also a mainstream topic, that's a definite red flag. In my case, I would consider joining that channel a waste of time and energy. If I'm interested in a mainstream topic, sorting the channels by user count will quickly reveal where people go to escape the madness; as channels get big and sickly the interesting and helpful people tend to go to one of the sattelite channels that don't have those problems. As an example, the best channel on Python I found for my purposes had ~5-15 active users per day. I'm especially happy with IRC, because I am intrinsically drawn to more obscure technologies and their channels don't have these problems.

That said, IRC is made by the communities using it. The only, but a significant technological advantage it has over other chat mediums is its minimalism. Barebones chat is much more conducive to technical discussions, than the bloated alternatives, and I think the same applies for other kinds of discussions as well.

Or equivalently you might be praising a protocol for some excellent channel choices (to be accurate, this would be a response to the grand-grandparent comment).

My personal experience suggests that IRC communities are just like other communities, that is, with a right amount of moderation and a right set of users they will survive, otherwise they will fail.

It's true that IRC is not free of tension and caustic groups. That said, like reddit, you can find very nice places to chat. #electronics #emacs both are very light on issues and very openminded (maybe too open minded some would say).

I talk a lot in #emacs and I do treat it like a coffee klatch, but when people come with questions, I try to interrupt myself and at least address their questions.

I like #emacs. It's like a gathering of friends who happen to use Emacs.

#emacs is an off-topic channel, if you have any questions(that you can't find just by googling), then it's best to use stackexchange/reddit.

Sorry, I'll try to do a better job to answer your question in there next time I see it.

hi, i'm python476 (i know, awkward), so you know I share your sentiment about emacs. And #electronics is similar. Just a bunch of dudes who like that topic, but it's rarely on topic, and they're one of the most friendly bunch I've seen.

Wait, you think #python on Freenode is a friendly place? It's consistently the worst channel I've visited on IRC. The language is fantastic though.

I think it reflects the community's extremes. I have been using less and less Python because so many of the community can at times be their own worst enemy or mine. Personally I steer people to different first languages just so they don't get stuck only knowing Python.

What channels are you using? Killing peoples spirit maybe once in a blue moon someone is rude. However, if anything I would say people are polite than they used to be. People still using IRC like IRC why would they want to actively harm the channels they use.

wow, i have not made such experiences on IRC, worst things happened to me were questions go unnoticed.

but i also use it only for very specific technical topics.

I saw some, people can be tense, angry, mean, sometimes even so while wrong. I remember a dude going down on me because he misread quicksort in my question and started to unleash unjustified ad-hominem insulting comments until he/she realized.

People are people I guess.