We started out making Slack and Discord Google searchable and search engine friendly see: kotlin for example https://slack-chats.kotlinlang.org/ they have around 50,000 pages indexed by Google. We render a static version for Google while giving you the real time experience of a chat app.
Secondly most large communities end up being a community support channel. So for anyone with customer support experience having your conversation in one place is really crucial as well as some sort of open close state. I was also the author for https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups which made me a bit opinionated in terms of community/customer support
Finally most communities end up being too noisy and in part is because it is designed for chat. I actually don't think there is a great solution out there to manage conversations at a large scale and we think we can innovate on the UX of it.