I agree. Forums and old school personal web sites were much better for quality content than blogs or social media. Things went in the direction of mental junk food, focusing on getting a lot of new content as quick as possible.
It's not a tooling problem. There are several high quality forum tools out there. Discourse being one of them. But getting people to actually participate seems impossible. I've had a Discourse instance running for family for over a year now. It's basically empty.
I've tried inviting friends to a another instance, and only one ever showed up.