Twitter was always useless for me for having a conversation. It's just shouting short phrase into the void hoping someone will shout some other short phrase back. It's roughly equivalent of ICQ status message. Little text you could attach to information whether you are online or not. Technically you could have conversation through that but it is more like passive-aggressive shouting match in a large room full of other people than actual conversation. Twitter is exactly that for me and I refuse to participate.
And Facebook forces you to have one exposed identity and glues it to your face and your mom. So it's useless for conversation purposes because you won't dare to say there anything ever. I still have an account if only to see what my family and friends are doing with their lives and using messenger because nobody installs even skype anymore.
Pretty much old conversation systems from my point of view faded away into their most limiting and stupid parts.
Bye bye ICQ or your local equivalent of that experience.
And forums got digg treatment. In the old days you could say whatever you thought and you only risked that some people will mute you or you get kicked out of that forum right away. Now everything is gamified, you get downvoted, you are loosing karma, your post fades away for everybody, gets buried. And it hurts much. To much to risk expressing any opinion you might think is controversial. Because cost is loosing points you learned to care about, loosing standing on a platform, the only platform. There's no second HN, no second reddit.
Instead of providing personalized tools for muting trolls and their feeders forums transformed into gamified, mob-policed states that keep everybody in check with self-censorship. The only people that break through that are straight up racist, sexist trolls that don't care about anything and anybody. People with most extreme views. And then everybody else can say: "See? That's why we can't have nice things. That's what we have downvoting for."
Modern internet is different. It's better in many aspects. Youtube is modern marvel for hands-on learning. But freedom of expression definitely suffered.