A valid question. IRC, however is old technology. There are permanency issues. Unless I have a client configured which saves logs, I can't see old discussions I had.

But, I think you do get the idea. IRC is solving the use case I plan to solve with modern technology, and by getting rid of some of its culture. I don't see any corporate meetings happening on IRC. I don't see startups discussing ideas in IRC. Nicknames, bots, strict environment, lack of ease-of-use and design, mostly limited to technical topics, no idea of multiple topic discussions(from quora). Just few of the many things here IRC stops behind to serve this particular use case.

What about Campfire then?

Nah. I see the words "Plans and Pricing" and "30 day trial" on their landing page.

Ok, I'll play: Convore?

It's gone, replaced with grove.io apparently, which costs money (30 day free trial, 10 bucks a month cheapest tier).

Right, but Convore existed and died. One explanation was "it wasn't actually popular or necessary". It would seem useful if not actually important to figure out how this is different from that service, given that that service had strong backing and even had a temporary working community surrounding it.