Discord is basically the monkey paw wish for everyone who hated Reddit.
Hate how Reddit killed forums? Well, now your favorite communities have moved to a place that is (functionally) worse. Now, you can't even view what is going on without creating an account, and if you sign up with a VPN, then you better provide a phone number. And don't you dare browse any of our communities on anything other than our official clients, or we will permaban you.
We are also now the place for video game modders and ROM hackers to share their content, so you better sign up if you want to download the latest mods and ROM hacks.
However, as most internet users became phone posters, forums lost proportionally traffic and were defunded by advertisement. In the meantime, the hole left in their wake was fulfilled by reddit and discord, which both provided convenient apps and no need to juggle between multiple accounts. Unfortunately they were also huge centralized platforms, but normies wouldn't care
tl;dr: The iPhone birthed the phone poster Internet user, who killed the forum ecosystem because there was not a convenient app to post on forums
@vokainen099 @beardalaxy Several things killed forums, from what I can tell:
* Spam - Pretty much every forum admin had to deal with spambots one way or another. They needed constant moderation, otherwise the threads would be filled up with "WATCH FREE MOVIES ONLINE" posts.
* Abusive forum admins - This is one thing I've been stressing about and many people don't realize. A lot of forums had very strict rules on par with many Mastodon servers. Pretty much every forum I was active on banned anything that couldn't be said on terrestrial radio and prohibited topics that they thought were illegal (e.g emulators).
* Not being mobile friendly - Just like you said. This could've been fixed via a common API. Pretty much every modern imageboard software uses the 4chan API, so it could've been done.
* No easy way to format text - Most forums use BBCode which isn't as friendly as Markdown or just simply having a rich-text box.
* No easy way to upload images - Most forums require you to upload the image elsewhere (like Photobucket) and externally link the image via BBCode.
@beardalaxy Well I think part of the appeal of Discord is that posts are not searchable on major search engines, so people aren't cataloging every post you make. Granted, someone with knowledge of Discord's API or with a script they found online can do just that, but still.