I'd say that IRC is the quickest way of the recent past of getting a decent answer. The best answers were mostly centered in USENET (if you remember), and irc was mostly centered around esoteric discussions, malicious and not. A good search and some patience will take the newbie a very long way nowadays. And there is a forum for everything now as well. I think that the real-time chat is not very good now given the size of the audience. I was in IRC chat- rooms in the 90s with 20 individuals talking and that was hard to do. At some point there had to be moderation and there were limits of who could "talk" while the masses could only listen. The numbers of users was the killer of IRC, and it makes sense to me. Nowadays tech service companies (such as Rackspace/Slicehost) use this for one-on-one chat customer support. That is the extent of the use I see of real-time chats. Glad to have been part of it in the early days when it was useful.