It was a collection of silly quotes from IRC channels everywhere, many of which dated back to the 90s. It was rarely ever updated in the 2010s, but now, the URL no longer resolves.
Last capture was July 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20230601000000*/bash.org
EDIT Someone archived all the quotes on the Internet Archive.
Your personal experience is biased as fuck because having to go through phone verification or downloading a sketchy proprietary client is in no way far more convenient than firing up irc
As someone who’s run an irc server and dealing with fun attacks multiple times a year, the phone verification is great. It almost completely eliminates the DoS/spam problem.
IRC was fine at the time but it’s so more of an administrative headache than Discord.