I don't understand the question. IRC is a real-time chat protocol and twitter is a proprietary micro-blogging website. I don't see how the two are related, other than they are both something to do with the Internet.
The above commenter is correct, the original question is silly, however much flak they may get as people here love IRC.
Do you genuinely believe (1) IRC is anywhere near as usable as Twitter for the general population, or that (2) a real-time chat is an equivalent offering to Twitter?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not a silly response. The thing about IRC is that there's channels, and you chat with people in those channels. The deal with Twitter is you both publish and subscribe to short messages, but there's no enforcement of reciprocity -- I don't have to follow someone just because they follow me. There are replies, but that's not the same thing, and Twitter is starting to give people more tools to restrict replies to their Tweets, making the platform even less reciprocal. Everyone in an IRC channel gets the same experience, everyone on Twitter gets a unique experience.
If my only current understanding of a question is "that's a silly question," then I'm also going to assume first that it's my failure to understand rather than assuming something worse about someone else.
