I avoided saying the F word until recently

Some forums want to lower entry and support login with <insert larger login provider>. Please do not lower the barrier.

It is true though that forums never really died. I would consider HN more of a forum than social media if you have to discriminate. Aside from the business value, if you want to deep dive into a hobby, Instagram, Facebook and co. just often do not deliver. Depends a bit on the type of hobby, but if it isn't something around personalities, social media in general is quite shallow.

But worse is the move to platforms like Discord. I use it too, no judgement here. But it sucks. It consumes all the knowledge people post into it and it doesn't give anything back. You cannot crawl it. Even IRC is crawled more successfully.

Sure, I guess they have some api that could access the content theoretically. Doesn't help. I think many businesses and projects decide to use discord because it is so easy and a community builds quickly. But I believe there are huge long term disadvantages for discovery later.