I'll add (3) the only reason IRC isn't equally abused is because it's so bad that it can't attract enough people to justify any kind of ad-based (or otherwise) monetization model. IRC is the opposite of being a victim of one's own success.

EDIT: I should note that beyond being more usable than IRC, I have precious little good to say about Twitter.

I'm beginning to seriously believe the general population doesn't deserve services like Twitter and giving it to them was a mistake. When something can be had so easily there is no respect for it. A lack of respect for the technology and a lack of thoughtfulness into its implications have caused a lot of harm. The hope of the internet was that it would increase communication and understanding. But nobody is communicating. They are talking at each other. They should be listening but have just become more self absorbed.

So in a way IRC is better. If for no other reason because it required some personal discipline and will to learn to use and it segmented the internet to prevent these monstrous echo chambers. Humans aren't ready for a global forum. We are still only good at small communities.

If this is your takeaway you’re following toxic people. I have learned a lot and changed my mind on several issues just from Twitter discourse.

Or they clicked on a trending topic on the wrong day.

Or they read an article about one twitter group bashing another twitter group and clicked on one of the tweets.

There's no path from toxic Twitter to constructive Twitter, but there are thousands of paths the other way.

Which can only mean that toxic twitter is where Twitter wants its users, so it seems like you're using twitter wrong in their view.

That would imply that Twitter has total control about such paths; I find it hard to believe.

In general social media is a big negative for people. Just because some of them find it useful doesn't change that.

My point isn't that meaningful conversation is impossible on twitter. Its that the majority isn't and most abuse the gift of an instant global platform. Its tragedy of the commons on an unprecedented scale.

Of course there are worthwhile interactions to be made. But the people making them would have been doing so on the less accessible older internet anyways.

The old internet was filled with hate, racism, sexism, people fighting, hating and swearing. Things are actually better.

The news seems just as negative as social media.

These things existed, but you usually had to go seek them out specifically. You weren't reading a friend's, say, blog, when suddenly a link to some exciting online argument about some nonsense appeared. That does happen on ~all social media. Unfortunately, many news(paper) websites are baiting with "hot" controversial topics now as well.

I see you were not part of the "old internet".

You just need to make an IRC channel that contains everyone in the world.

No, it would be one channel per person. Only you would be able to talk (post) in your channel. People who want to read your posts would join your channel.

Private DMs easily map to one-on-one privmsgs. Public replies and threads won't have an equivalent unless there was some meta-protocol to temporarily allow another person to talk in your channel + duplicate your posts in your channel to theirs + expire that access eventually.

Also subscribing to tags won't work without a similar "copy all messages from one channel to another" relay.

Channels are basically tags, without history for those who join. Anyone can PRIVMSG a channel by default, it is prevented by setting the common +n mode.

My point is that IRC messages need to be duplicated across multiple channels to be the equivalent to how Twitter works.

Well to compare that to Twitter you'd also have to have everyone in the world on Twitter which is overwhelmingly not the case.

That's basically what twitter is.

Make all channels -n and you now have Twitter hashtags, kind of.

IRC is just a protocol... one could potentially implement a client (or website if you wish) which presented IRC comments as a "tweet stream".

Malicious bots are definitely more effective and reliable on Twitter.