Well, yeah. When I was a teenager my group of friends used to use a QNet IRC chat for communications. Most on mIRC and such clients. Today it's pretty much all nerds. I do enjoy IRC, and pretty much live inside my tmux session, but I don't think I can recommend it to anyone who isn't already probably using it.
Probably says more about your social circle than IRC. There's a lot of channels and if hookers and blow are more your speed than say, gentoo, you can certainly find a channel primarily discussing them.
First off, I don't believe there's anything even remotely wrong with being a nerd. Quite the opposite. I do hang around in channels focussing on a diverse range of topics, from various freenode foss-channels to torrent trackers to radical politics and also, yes, shadier communities.
I just believe that even the most benign, non-techy use of IRC poses demands that are incompatible with the vast majority of users today. But that's a strength to me. IRC is filled to the brim with some of the smartest, most creative, exciting people I could think of.
> but I don't think I can recommend it to anyone who isn't already probably using it
I wouldn't recommend it to my friends, who were hard enough to get off WhatsApp and into Telegram at least. To my parents, who have trouble enough running Skype. To the girlfriend, who's happy with Snapchat. IRC, even at the very basic level with a GUI or Web client, demands things from users I don't consider realistic to expect from them.
I'm very happy with it the way it is though. Just saying that I won't waste time recommending Arch Linux as a desktop OS to friends who have trouble keeping a Windows install useable for six months.
