Forums are -- or used to be, anyway -- a hybrid form of communication: it's both immediate but also useful for achival purposes. Many forums will tell you to read a specific thread when you want info about something in particular. In some forums, users use specific threads for archival/progress of a project.
Chat is ephemeral like you describe, but forums aren't necessarily.
I think the curation piece that separates chatter now vs. published organized information is where forums lie in the middle of
>If you're, for example, contributing to a reddit thread about something which is irrelevant or anything with only a short-term relevance, this article does not apply to you right now.
Forums often end up with some posts that have a more long term benefit, and those should be hosted somewhere else.
I have parsed many old forums after a search engine sent me there - this has been my primary education tool for different things. Niche issues encountered by several strangers across the world can be resolved by someone who made a post one time so it can occupy some hardware storage, perhaps many times archived in several scattered drives depending on its contribution value, from where it can be served to anyone else who needs it in the future.
Web forum archive shuttering described by the author would limit information available for the search engine to parse. But the author's solution is to reduce contribution effort because forums may disappear one day? [1]
I agree with you - within a week of something posted is when the "work" gets done (and idea transmitted out of internet into physical group of people who can relay the memory). Seeing a snapshot of a helpful interaction between people skilled in different domains sharing observations/stories/explanations is often inspiring to me and so I would want the creators of this content to put their best foot forward instead of treating it as disposable communication space.
I was thinking about this yesterday actually. I’ve been having a lot of questions about this new linux distro I’ve been using, and piling them on in the IRC channel, but if no one answers it right away it gets buried by the next message after me. So I kept re-asking it for multiple days before realizing, you know what if this is something that only even a few people might know how to help me with, I should probably leave it to “steep” on a proper Discourse topic, or reddit thread, or stackoverflow question or whatever. I hadn’t done that because I was just super impatient and knew it might be a good half a day or 2 or 3 days before I get a reply, but it’s much more likely to get one at all than in the IRC, where someone butting in with a meme or something right after me means my question might as well be nonexistent in the conversation stream.
It's just that the internet allows them to be async conversations. A forum is fairly equivalent to email, just usually more public than email and the underlying infrastructure isn't federated.
Email is a persistent conversation which gets archived indefinitely, not an ephemeral one like talking with our mouths.
Corporate email (and IM, etc) gets purged pretty quickly, within 2-3 years, unless you save a particular message / thread explicitly.
The point is to communicate with other people here and now, to help each other on short notice, to spread knowledge which the readers can apply immediately.
It's like mistaking talking for books. Talking is fleeting, but also indispensable for doing anything of consequence (including writing a book).