Breaking up with Slack and Discord: why it's time to bring back forums

The four wheeling and automotive communities in general have been in disarray lately based on the instant gratification of Facebook groups, and chats such as slack and discord.

Partially because these systems are far simpler for adding audiovisuals however the utility of an organized system with archived knowledge is lost. When Photobucket took down user uploaded content troves of niche information were lost. I do hope that as the cost of saving data reduces over time that data rot is generally reduced. Troves of nontrivial knowledge being destroyed is abhorrent.

Primarily I believe that the difficulty is in the fact that social media is designed to be addictive. Not to be an archive of knowledge.

Fora can be lost too. Such as the literal Spanish clone for Slashdot, Barrapunto. It was a hub of geeks/nerds/researches/science guys and who knows what.

I do agree that most communities should use forums instead because it's searchable by search engines and it's more organized.

I'd also argue that search has gotten much worse not because of SEO spam, but because of communities going to chat, news & blog paywalls, and app-dominant social media. There's not much left for Google to actually crawl. That's why search results are so bad.

Finally, I don't understand why Discord doesn't take advantage of this and create a search engine crawlable forum inside their app. They'd dominate search results and compete with Reddit. If I'm working there, this is what I would push for. Slack is focused on enterprise sales so it won't work for them. But Discord has no excuse.