LOL, just post a link to the rich content, that is how its mostly done with hexchat these days. Of course you could just DCC the content to someone too.

But it serves to discourage anything that isn't actual conversation, which might not be a bad plan in the end.

Having been on chat from slack to discord to reddit chat to telegram... I focus back on IRC for its simplicity and lack of video and image-spam

In rare instances pictures add to the conversation. But 99 times out of 100, that pic is some reaction gif (spongebob, wat, etc). And I'd argue that these reaction images are completely worthless.

In a way, it's also the comparison between fb or reddit vs HN or lobste.rs .

Parsing and displaying a gif is not such a complicated matter that it comes anywhere close to excusing the resource gap between the two.