The async aspect of forums worked way better for community building in my opinion.
This realization that the online community space has grown more diverse than just a single medium was the inspiration for us building Sociables.
We've been working on a community platform that combines the feature set of Discord with the discussion boards and discoverability of Reddit. It's like a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid where the posts are search engine indexable. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform as it feels like the people curating the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.
I prefer the Slack model where you can reply inside a thread and you replies stay within the thread instead of being scattered all over the place like IRC.
I hate to admit it, but this is one thing that Slack does better than IRC, except that in that model you do miss seeing everything that's talked about in the channel (because many of the conversations are hidden in the threads), but it's a better model for organization.
None of that changes its main societal flaw which is being a walled garden. So much loss of information.
Course, the bigger problem with centralized corporate services is that discord themselves could be shipping off that data on the backend to god knows who... but from the "protect me from other individual harassing me forever about shit I said once" front, Discord has some obvious appeal.
So I find that digging things up still happens (even a former employer did it to me!). I guess it feels more self-contained though, and it spreads a little slower.
Throwing back to the past, central logging is new, and twenty years ago it would've been hearsay where many people couldn't verify those claimed past conversations. I would have no issues with a two-month default expiry policy for these things.
1. Set your own notification preferences to @mentions only. Tell your friends they need to tag you for anything urgent or you won't see it until later. For bigger servers where you might want to get notified from a news channel, just set preferences on that channel or see if there is an optional notification role available. I check the backlog on my favorite channels only once or twice a day and they do not bother me out of band, ever.
2. Review your list of servers and leave any that abuse @everyone or that you have not actually checked into for awhile. This is user behavior, not the platform.
3. just speedclick all the fucking tutorials once and they will not come back.
With the community building aspect, forums were not great for it. Due to how fragmented it was, and how subforums were often dramatically different sections, this meant that unless you were genuinely deeply into [topic] and were spending numerous hours per day regularly you would not build a community at all there. This is why on most forums, it's only the trolls who became known, they had that cross-contamination aspect. Forums also had a lot of UX that discouraged caring about the user. Names were tucked away, profile images were tiny, people hid signatures due to how obnoxious they got. They became the equivalent of reading a mailing list you were randomly added into.
This doesn't really excuse Discord. By default it encourages too many indicators. Tutorials for new accounts, rule modules, every channel has an indicator on it, there's buttons left right and center making you afraid to click anything, then the whispers for joining servers, the list goes on. This is one aspect that I hope Discord spends severe amount of resources looking at in 2024. Which I think they absolutely are capable of doing, but I'm not sure if their investors care about the new user experience sadly.