I feel you on this — to me it’s baffling that anyone could use chat, such as Discord, as a replacement for a forum, or Reddit. Asynchronous is so different than synchronous. Chat rooms aren’t new either. But they mean you can only meaningfully communicate with people in your rough time zone and even your same daily routine. I suppose you could pretend Discord is Reddit, if all users were super judicious about only conversing inside “threads” unless they’re trying to start a truly new topic, but people seem to do a lot of chat outside threads, so even finding threads requires wading through the ocean of single messages. Reddit (and arguably Digg, I forget which did it first) solved the main issues with forums: the cost one of who would actually set it up, the signup one (because it was one centralized account), and the thread-management one (voting meant you could probably find most of the best posts even on a thread with 100 or 1000 or 10,000 posts). For all its hideous faults lately, I wish it would be “mastodoned” (where the feature set in the key ways is arguably better, such as the character count not being required to be 280, and having decentralized moderation instead of “whatever TWTR decides to bother with”) rather than have everyone flee to something that is a mismatched replacement. It would be like if HN collapsed and we tried to use “a Twitter hashtag” as the replacement.