Voice, video, realtime interaction, a devoted user base, an incredible amount of money…

What do you mean by voice and video? Why would I want to have voice in a forum? I think that would be akin to receiving voice messages in messengers. Or do you mean, that for these kinds of things a widget can be displayed? That certainly is possible in old style forums. It is just HTML, an embed code away.

Discourse, not Discord.

whoopsie. thanks.

I like the scroll view in discourse. Makes it super easy to follow a thread. The subthreads and replies are also easier to use. The search is better, the ability to upvote makes it better for some use cases, and in general phpbb is a mess in terms of actually being able to see what's useful and what threads are relevant.

I think flipping the question makes more sense, why do you think some forums switched to or started using discourse instead of just using phpbb? I can guarantee you that it's not just to follow a fad or whatever, most niche or support forums don't care about that.

I do think trendiness and modern feeling uis are requirements for most forums these days from most perspectives.

I say this as someone that frequently uses and enjoys both rue brutalist design of a text web browser and the emacs mastodon client.

Discourse still offers a worse experience than phpBB though, even if you use a fast device.

I was thinking about this when I saw this post earlier today.

Why shouldn't the default be: does this website work in Lynx? I think that's a damn good baseline.

And in response to the other parent post, on a (almost) new iPhone, both news sites & Twitter continuously crash and reload for me. I'm not sure what the state of these other popular sites are because I don't use them.