As someone who was a prolific user of both I'm going to come to the defense of Discord here.
First let me say that yes there is some valid critism to be had. Mostly around information preservation, lack of indexing by search engines, barrier to entry, those kinds of things. I agree that those can make Discord a bad platform for a random technical project to use as a support forum / bug tracker / log. (though you can always write a bot for that).
However, with respect, some comments (not all!) do feel a bit like people are simply getting older and blaming technology for what are really demographic changes.
Consider this comment by Azalea on the first page has a quite a few people agreeing with it, it says
> And without going all good-old days Internet you damn whippersnappers, I think the move towards chat-room style dialogues also signifies a cultural shift towards bite-sized content and quick, shallow, generally meaningless interactions. I have made a grand total of one friend on Discord servers after posting compulsively and replying to a lot of people. Social interactions on the Internet don't really have the same weight and permanence that they used to.
which wasn't really my experience on Discord, but then it also goes on to say
> I miss the old days of logging into my favorite Counter-Strike: Source servers and interacting with the regulars there. Everyone on VOIP playing the same game can lead to bonding experiences, and I made a fair bit of friends on those servers. Now with public matchmaking, that old-school magic has mostly disappeared.
Which to me is that quick-fire social interaction they seemingly called shallow and meaningless. This struck me as odd because having lived trough the rise of social media and matchmaking Discord feels like a return to this old 'social' internet. Especially during these last few years, It's been great for my social life. I've made new friends and reconnected with old ones. Just yesterday I visited a friend I met on Discord.
And I don't think I'm alone: plenty of people heavily use Discord for hanging out with friends, forming gaming groups, discussing and playing together. Everything that they say is lacking in the modern internet. And not just for gaming, There's plenty of LGBT+ spaces, location based spaces, or Maker spaces too.
But one thing I have noticed, is that at 28 years old I already skew old in most spaces. Because of that I'll generally avoid spaces that don't have a reasonable minimum age because I don't really care for hanging around in spaces dominated by teens. But for those teens, and once you find spaces that fit you, Discord is a great place for fostering _community_. In a way that games and IRC/forums used to provide when I was a teen, before social media and 'matchmaking' kind of scrubbed that from the mainstream for a while.
That's why I don't think the kinds of complaints given in the quotes is realy an issue of technology, but an issue of demographics and aging.
But maybe this is just me being an extrovert with ADHD liking the shiny chatterbox with cute emotes.