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« on: May 31, 2022, 01:10:16 AM »
Most definitely, but I also fear that this shared experience of niche forum communities can never be created again in the modern internet. Social media and media aggregator websites have created this strange trend in that people post things in order to validate themselves with platitudes and/or fake internet points. Whenever I post to a thread here I actually wish to contribute to the conversation, however small or stuffty my contribution may be, to at least leave some sort of impact on the thread or other forumers. The forum threads themselves also have an enduring value to it, where certain conversations and topics can be found neatly in specific posts under specific sections and can usually be viewed or searched for without having to sign up. This is in contrast to the modern Discord server which have mostly replaced forum communities.
To actually see anything you have at least have an account to join the server, then search function is awful and all information is found between conversations in the constant stream of text and images that is the chat history. Because of its nature as a messaging client it also forces you to have to keep up with the current conversation. With forums I can reply to a thread and just read new posts later. On Discord its a constant back and forth conversation and some people are prolific enough posters that it becomes too much of an effort to catch up. It also makes it awkward to post replies to previous topics and conversation because if its too late many people have already moved on from the "topic of the moment". Though forum posts can run into similar issues these problems are exaggerated by how Discord works. Sorry if this felt like a crotchety old man rant, I just felt like I had to at least share my opinion on the medium before its too late.