this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.
They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord "solved". A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.
Discord is just objectively terrible for knowledge. It's not search indexable or archivable. It's more or less a memory hole.
Discord is a communications platform with tacked on features that resemble forums mostly as a means of organization. It's not a KB or repository under any circumstances outside of misuse, so why would it have to be good at being searched/indexed?
I hope you're not implying an old forum search was any good
Most decent forums were publicly readable online and thus got indexed by actually decent search engines unlike discord. Hence "search indexable"
I'm not sure why people think that discord search is some kind of gotcha. Its shit.
I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don't think following them is a good strategy for life.
Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that's not really accurate anyways.
maybe you are right. i think people just forgot about it because of all the noise and because all these new platforms force bad habits. just imagine if those platforms didn't exist where would openai and anthropic be without all that stackexchange/stackoverflow data scraping.
Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.
i know, but for casual conversations and banter and a place where to store some knowledge about some topics forums were awesome.
Forums work for knowledge storage, but for casual banter real time conversations trump everything
yeah, forums are cool but I remember changing to another medium like MSN Messenger to do real time conversations
Yea... Forums were (are) great for something that Discord isn't great at...
The old bulletins of the pre2000s. ASCII art every where.
oh yeah!