I feel your pain. I was lucky enough to be around to enjoy the days when the ONLY place online where people were discussing serious topics (and non-serious ones!) was USENET (and maybe The Well). Google Groups just started to throw a web interface on USENET.

Sadly, once big money entered the Web in the late 90's, every Portal popping up felt like they had to include discussions/message boards into their features.

Yahoo Groups was big in the day and is now essentially dead. Same with Facebook, etc.

Now everything is very fragmented. There are some really great discussions happening out there (metafilter.net is a good example) but they are hard to find.

Reddit might be the closest thing to a groups/USENET replacement that we have.

I'd love to hear about anything else out there that may save civil discourse, but I have my doubts it exists (or will). (although web3 may save us yet - nostr is pretty interesting)

After all, what does it mean when 90% of people spend their time on Instagram and Tiktok?