One downside to the rise of discord and the decline of forums is that all these interesting discussions are now ephemeral and essentially unsearcahable

Now public forums and comment flamewars weren't great either, but before everyone retreated into these private spaces you used to know what all the main points of discussion were. Now the tide's gone out and there's just a few small crustaceans quietly snapping at each other

I'm all for people using private spaces as they want and I don't really have a coherent complaint pointing towards a solution; Just lamenting that Twitter (ugh) is now what passes for the "central public forum" these days, and the rest is private clubs.

If you're not in these private clubs, or don't know how or where to find them (in our industry it's private email lists, private forums, private and semiprivate discords) you miss out on a lot of key connections, especially b/c one chief way you get invited is in-person events