Are they searchable and indexable? What made PHPBB and all that cool was that it'd turn up in search queries. As a hobbyist, this was an incredible wealth of information for me that has mostly dried up with the advent of walled gardens like slack, discord, etc. Some might point at BBS and IRC and say that those were the same, but I'd argue that they had lower volume, and less rich media, and I'd go one further to say…
On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and indexed is always a benefit. I like the idea of a semi-private space. I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com ". I can tell a lot of people are the same way just by their behavior; the discussion that happens on Discord is a lot different than anything on, say,…
but plenty of it isn't, the growth of larger discord guilds necessarily changes that. discord has led to a net-loss for information sharing within the fighting game community, for example. join a half-dozen guilds, one for each game, your local group (and the local Smash scene doesn't hang out on the same guild as the anime fighters, etc etc), etc, and there's no way to search for questions across them, so everyone joins and has to interact with some bot to address FAQs or annoy the "regulars" or get shuffled off to some other chat room with its own anti-spam verification bot and its own document index and its own culture. you have to hope that folks have pinned messages to google docs you can still access with information about character matchups, frame data, etc ... and figuring out which/who to connect with to learn a new game is basically difficult to solve in this decentralized fashion after years of forums and wikis like shoryuken disappearing to be replaced with adhoc un-indexed chat rooms and google docs.