He thinks we are. I never thought about it before. Maybe in the case of some Reddit subreddits and other forums, but I don't think so in general. I've got a lot great information from forums.

I agree that we're not past the days of forums. Part of what made forums and Reddit great was that you knew that you were interacting with multiple people, and that a lot of information was filtered through some form of consensus. If the advice given was wrong, you usually had additional replies saying it was incorrect, and pointing out what was wrong, or the OP adding more information if asked/incorrect.

You can't really do that as easily with blogs and things, both because it's usually written by one person with presumably little verification (who may have unclear credentials if you're not familiar with them, or that area of work), even before the rise of AI and auto-generated SEO blogs which say nothing useful with a lot of words.

From a usability standpoint, there is also something nice about a forum, since they're usually not that terribly infested with ads, or things like algorithms designed to push content and keep people on the platform. You can just come and go as you please, although necroposting is usually frowned upon. At most, you might have some sorting that keeps the posts in chronological/activity order, but that's about it.

The only problem is the " reddit" google search. If these discussions start to be on lemmy and we append lemmy instead of reddit, in time there's gonna be tons of malicious instances that fill the site with ads and generate content with AI just to get to that google 1st page.