Discussion groups and forums used to be useful, but now they're dying out and being replaced by undiscoverable walled garden facebook groups and discord servers...

This, pseudonymous de-centralized discussion groups and forums, is what I would pick as the one thing I would like to bring back to the internet. There used to be a forum about everything, each one it's own community, most of which didn't require ties to a real-world identity.

I'm sure they exist, but they are really hard to find.

They exist in abundance on IRC.

This was my immediate response. The number of forums available has plummeted. And as @maskros says, they are all in private Facebook groups now. Private because no-one wants their personal life trickling into their Facebook feed in case someone from work sees it.

On Facebook, you don't need to use a private group for privacy. You set up a different audience group that isn't public and change the audience to one that is non-public.

That may be true but if you moderate a group you get requests from people to make it private who either don't know this or don't know the difference.

Or don't trust Facebook to just change the way 'privacy' works

The Internet is a dark forest. As soon as there is money to be made or power to be gained by exploiting something, the barbarian hordes will burn it to the ground unless it's behind towers and walls.

Came here to say forums. Niche areas of information which no social media platform can begin to compete with.

And what's frustrating is that you can't even search those facebook groups (AFAIK).

By design I would suspect. Facebook is an informational black hole. Even the referrer links from there are useless.

Yup - it's actively hostile to anyone trying to visit anonymously: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/151591/facebook-...

(Never mind the overlays which take up about a third of the viewport height and beg you to login / sign-up - Twitter have started doing this recently)

Discoverability is deliberately hampered by the lack of pagination and reliance on infinite scrolling.

i was shocked when i found there’s no way to link or share a specific comment.

Big forums can cost a lot of money to run and managing the spam can be a mess these days. Not only that the boards that have enough proper tools to deal with the spam aren't free. Sure there are plugins for some forum software that fix a few things, but often you have to install 6 plugins and that still isnt enough, plus then you have to do updates and hope it doesnt break those un-official plugins.

Even blog comment sections are overrun with spam links.

great advice, and I'd add that it doesn't even have to be a particularly intelligent question. I found bret devereaux's excellent blog by googling "game of thrones historical accuracy" and got far more than I expected.

There are specific content bloggers and life bloggers. Someone may have a great bbq post but the blog is filled with other subjects. The people who write only about bbq usually are part of a sales funnel process.