I'm a forum veteran, spent years on the staff of a popular gaming forum, and these days it's hosted on my personal server as a nod to history, though there's li

I'm a forum veteran, spent years on the staff of a popular gaming forum, and these days it's hosted on my personal server as a nod to history, though there's little activity. And I agree with this, each forum was a society in itself with regulars who would know each other very well, and other recognizable people. A lot of that is, I think, due to the visual layout of forums. There's a thread layout that UBB used, and later phpBB and vBulletin shipped with similar layouts, where each post has a poster info box on the left side, prominently displaying the username and some other info about the poster (join date, title). Avatars would also soon appear there. The poster infobox, along with signatures, made it visually easy to recognize the different people and subconsciously learn them. Compare to something like HN or classic Reddit, where the username is in a small font above the post text, and in HN's case in a less prominent color. I accept that most forums have died and they're now a niche platform, but I still don't think anything replaces them well. The other platforms are all very different. (Micro)blogs are built around one person's content. Platforms like Reddit are built for discussion, but in a way that encourages fast discussion and fairly brief posts, it's not for conversations lasting days or weeks. Discord is great for real-time interaction but exchanges are even shorter, step away for an hour and the conversation has moved on completely on an active server. Discord is pretty much like IRC with formatted text and channel groups. Forums combine community-building aspects with a format that is well suited to long, detailed posts and conversations that develop over weeks. At the same time an active forum with decent moderation is also suitable for high traffic and rapid conversations, not quite Discord pace but rapid.