Not that I’m complaining, I just find it kinda interesting given how so much stuff demands you sign up & register to do much of anything on a service or site.
Is it simply a cool cultural element that’s persisted since IRC’s been around? Also shoutout to all the old hat IRC folks out there maintaining their servers and enabling drop-in questions this way, much appreciated!
There are service bots, that are used by many of the irc networks, that handle this within irc itself (nickserv, chanserv, etc…).