I don’t miss IRC at all. All I remember is harsh treatments and general harassment I received in those places as a kid/teen when I was trying to learn things, figure things out on the Internet. A lot of them were non-subtly targeted at my geography and race. I can never forget that. In fact those days taught me how people from different places look at racism in different ways and how for some there’s good racism and bad racism and then acceptable racism, including here on hn. It seems the “good early Internet” is a phenomenon experienced by very small subset of people even considering only the West.