I've found discord even worse in terms of cliques and meme spamming. And the closed off walled-garden nature doesn't sit well with me.

I do visit some niche Discord channels which are well guarded and the help is certainly there. Though, as another poster mentioned and I have said before is Discord allows too much distracting visual fluff. IRC keeps the conversation focused thanks to the lack of said visual fluff. It's also extremely cross platform and isn't hostile to community made clients.