this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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The amount of niche info that would have been found in searchable forum posts in years prior, that has now gotten sucked up into Discord where it can’t be found, fucking blows.
Well, forums are not real time, and that's what most people these days want apparently.
So, on to the alternatives:
Element / Matrix:
Revolt Chat
well, the problem is not that forums are not real time. the problem is that people use real time chats for things that should't be done in real time. like guides, which should stand on their own as an organized post, easily searched and found.
"real time" chats, that is, instant messengers, have their time and place. they have been around for a while, but they never really replaced forums. until discord came, which kind of then did. which i guess also resulted from facebook groups, twitter, instagram, and reddit first kind of partially replacing forums, after which then forums really fell out of favor, and discord really is way easier and better to interact with than any of the others mentioned (aside from maybe reddit). people are also just lazy and jusy use whatever works.
and people then started using discord like a forum since forums are almost dead and discord is just simple and easy. so many guides, info, announcements, etc. are put in discord like it is a forum since the admittedly amazing features for roles and bots make it convenient.
it all gets lost in a sea instant messaging organizing. to find something, one must go to one of a a bunch pinned messages in one of the bajillion channels that links to a post (i say oost, it is actually a message) which in turn links to a series of messages where someone knowledgeable posted something useful intertwined with shitpost messages fromither people. if you are lucky, someone made a google doc for a guide, but those also suck, and they are also not easily found unless you know the guy who knows the guy who knows which pinned message in which channel has the link to it.
You can't change how people want to communicate. So you either open a channel for people that won't sign up to a forum or don't get those users. Is it the best type of medium? Doesn't matter for them. It matters to other types of users.
I prefer Forums, but I'm not the type of user we are talking about.
Edit: I don't get why the downvotes, we are having a respectful conversation, if you downvote because you disagree, you are upvoting an echo chamber.