You're not addressing the other half of Scoble's point, which is not just lamenting that forums inevitably break down, but that blogs and Twitter and other such explicit lists offer a way out. I've been making this point for about eight years now, and while I (obviously) will still participate in forums such as this, I do it with the certain knowledge that it is only a matter of time before it falls apart and there is nothing I can do to prevent that, only delay it sometimes.

Meanwhile, my Google Reader remains as high quality now as it was when I first started using RSS nearly ten years ago. Not a whiff of degradation, because when a blog goes south, that blog gets evicted. If anything it's better.

It's a different type of community, and it isn't perfect in every way, but it scales radically better. A forum falls apart sometimes in the mere tens of active users, certainly by the thousands, but an RSS feed is just sitting there, serenely serving out.

(This is part of the reason I'm so against things like SideWiki, which threaten to bring forum user economics to every part of the web. Yes, to some extent you can just "not use it", but even the overflow of crap from the forumification of everything can reduce the value of a blog to you. This is also why I don't think it is necessary for a blog to have a comment section; why forcibly attach a forum to something that is superior in its own way?)