alt Hacker NewsThis is like the Linux discussion. (No its not the year of Linux no matter how much Windows 11 pisses you off)
"Old fashioned forums" absolutely suck for discoverability. You have to waste time digging through posts, most of which are unrelated or just filler. No upvote/downvote and usually a mediocre threading mechanism. While we are on this topic, Discord is the same. IRC like applications are not an easy way to get to the point for the same reasons.
I'm not sure I agree. If I go to a photography forum, there will be one thread for photos taken with a specific camera. Those threads are easily found and I can browse them to get huge amounts of relevant info if I'm interested in that camera. If I want to find that on Reddit or Discord, god help me. At best I can hope for a specific subreddit or server dedicated to that. But mostly I'll find hundreds of posts or comments mentioning or asking about that camera, all by people I don't know and have no way of judging if they know their stuff.
Discord and Reddit have so much repetition and fragmentation because there's no real organization of content, and people with no expertise often weigh in and even get upvoted because the average user is not particularly knowledgeable and the experts aren't on 24/7 looking for new posts to contribute to. On forums topics are stickier and get bumped when there's activity so experts more often find relevant threads and it's easier to judge reputations on forums.
Granted, badly managed forums are bad. If question threads from new users are mixed in with everything else they can quickly dominate search results. You need to be able to filter, but IME most forums do have pretty decent filters.