Discord and Slack communities could probably be helpful and I know a few that have some smart people, but on average they tend to be “bottom heavy” full of people just getting started and questions more advance that a typical noob question can go ignored.

I would almost never join a Discord/Slack to ask some specific question; I always ask people I already know. The level of effort is pretty high! Join, learn rules, figure out where and how to ask a question, then sit there and monitor things synchronously so people don't ignore you/forget you.

I really, really miss the abundance of forums. The only thing like them left these days with any sort of population is subreddits. There are still forums dedicated to niche topics, but they're rare.

There’s been a handful of times where the answer to my question exists seemingly only on some old Usenet archive.

The question is, why did they disappear? Did people just stop caring about things? Who in the right mind would ever want to use reddit -in general- and who would want to use it as long as there is a traditional forum for <topic>?

Reddit is _fine_ for this; it's just another place to host forums. The significant problem with reddit is that you have less control over it than an independent forum - but even with independent forums, someone can always take their ball and go home. (Usenet doens't suffer from this, though.)

And I don't know why it disappeared! Maybe because Slack and Discord finally opened up group chat to the masses who didn't like IRC. (Like it or not, Slack and Discord have defacto replaced IRC as the systems of choice for most people who don't know what DNS stands for.)

Reddit would have been fine if they didn’t make the UX as god awful as possible on a mobile browser. The day they cut off the old. subdomain I think they’ll be in for a surprise.

This is my move too and I believe it's a large part of why Google isn't as good as it used to be.

At one time your or my question would have been indexed into a search engine. Now it's mostly blogspam.

I think there is a lot of value to be unlocked if you could find a way to index discord channels (would probably have to work with discord on this due to their terms).

Of course slack and discords incentives aren't nessecarily aligned to want to do that either.

Do you know of any good discord servers? If you do then would you mind sharing an invite link??

> This is sad, because the question evaporates into the aether

Whatever happened to spectrum.chat? I know, GitHub killed it. But the real question is why no one else seems to be able to build an indexable chat platform?

Yeah, general channels are too ADHD and inferior to dedicated threads.