>And people also like interactivity and group chats. Group chats weren't a thing when I built my slowly dying forum, but they are now. And now I'm in like 5 gro

>And people also like interactivity and group chats. Group chats weren't a thing when I built my slowly dying forum, but they are now. And now I'm in like 5 group chats. And Discord is just an extension of that desire for interactivity that isn't just f5ing a forum. There's more to life and human interaction than writing paragraphs to each other on a forum. Something isn't lost just because people find other casual ways to interact online. You're cherry-picking a specific use-case of a forum and constructing a straw man out of it. Forums are (at least more than Discord) a very good tool for discussing strategies, making counter-arguments, posting guides, or organizing information. > But as someone who spent a summer of my youth arguing on forums that Xbox > PS2, I don't see gaming culture as something that's gotten worse. Except that wasn't what gaming culture was at the time for everyone. Because the attention economy is now concentrated on unthreaded discord chats, you have more drive-by commenters, messages taken out of context, lack of deliberate information, and more hoops to go through to get good information organized. Pinned messages aren't obvious to everyone and the UX for those limits the utility gained from it. Therefore it becomes much harder to disseminate good information to your community, guild, or whatever. People just aren't going to see it as much. That becomes baked into the culture, and the notion of sharing or teaching becomes seen as a thing for "boomers" or "autists" (actual words I've seen people use on the subject). This system might be an upgrade if you're getting drunk or doing drugs with the homies on a Friday night, but if you take gaming and teamwork seriously, it's a massive downgrade. > Also, 20 years ago my friend and I were voice chatting by strapping our house phone to our head with headbands. Ouch, depending on the model those have been known to emit 5000 times the RF radiation that a cellular phone typically emits. http://www.emfrf.com/how-green-is-your-cordless-phone-report/ http://www.emfrf.com/how-green-is-your-cordless-phone-report...