> The reliability and lack of bloat that are inherent to IRC ultimately also means that there are a number of fancy modern features that Discord has that IRC lacks, a big one being the inability to view backlogs of conversations that transpired while one was not connected to an IRC server. Although IRC does not itself provide this functionality, the extremely simple nature of IRC allows for a couple of lightweight op…
I like that IRC has no backlog support. When you join a channel it's like you actually joined a room. You don't know what they were talking about when you weren't there.
You need the irc services to keep specified information (like ownership of channels and nicknames) and they probably could also collect logs, with some limitations in case of netsplits of course.