That's pretty much a distillation of why I never understood the wave of Social Media; it appeared to be a dumbed-down and watered-down version of what the Internet was created for and the promise it had in the 90s into the early 2000s for me as kid. Limited engagement via sensationalism at the cost of actual substance and community, it was the junkfood-ification of the Internet I loved and much like junkfood it has caused all sorts of maladies as malaise seems to be a part of the UX these days.
I'm still part of a forum that was a fork that happened from an earlier forum, where that exact situation happens; the older guys form the early days who migrated to the new site reference a thread from the old forum and just say 'go search.' The issue is that while the original forum still exists, it has the worst indexing and makes it near impossible to look up the keywords without getting threads for like 20 other issues that have nothing to do with your search, something that oddly reminds me of the early days of using search engines before the days of Google.