1019
It's not just you — no one is posting on social media anymore
(www.businessinsider.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
what did it take from internet forums that IRC couldn't have realistically already done?
Most group chats to me are pretty much the same as IRC was back in the day, unless you examined the protocols themselves. Upload limits are also much larger (except for that brief period skype was popular and you could upload gigabytes)
Honestly the only thing group chats are bad at is archiving, and it's mainly because it's designed for real-time conversation (so people are spamming more) and sites can't search the stored text at all.