in all honesty, i think you're touching on two entirely separate problems here, and in my opinion, neither of them are solely a discord problem.



in terms of rping, i actually blame discord itself less and a combination of a lot of factors more.

as a few people have mentioned, there's a much higher expectation for forums than for discord - not just on the creation side (since imo skins have not only grown more complicated than they once were but they also have shifted increasingly towards being a paid commodity, which makes it harder for young people who may not have disposable income to be able to compete against those in the community who do, especially when you throw in other "expected" expenses like jcink premium or server boosts from discord nitro) but on the member side too. there's less of a learning curve for navigation, especially for mobile users, and there's a lot more of an expectation of "it's not pretty but it works" than "it has to be absolutely perfect or else i can't do it".

this also creates a much bigger "sunken cost" fallacy for forum rp than discord rp. after all, when you've spent so much time and energy (and potentially money, if you build the site) to go through the application process, get approved, try to find people to write with, get threads going, see those threads get replied to, and so on... it definitely stings whenever you realize that you just don't jive with the community or you aren't really all that excited anymore about your threads or you don't have the time to be able to rp there or whatever other reason leads you to walk away from a site. and that can lead to burnout a whole heck of a lot faster as a result.

discord also just generally has a faster culture than forums do (and like, bruh, ofc people are gonna be a lot more enthusiastic and invested in threads they're getting new content for daily, if not multiple times a day, instead of only once a month or less frequently); is generally more mobile-friendly (i can do literally everything on discord from my phone other than make avatars for tuppers for basically the exact same experience i'd have to do it from a desktop, which is something i haven't had with forums in almost a decade now); and just generally benefits from search engine prioritization (since if you google "[fandom] rp", the results used to list forums in the way it does now with discord servers / disboard) in a way that makes it easier for new rpers to find + get into the platform.

i could go on, but this is probably enough of a ramble to make my point.



outside of rping, with the archival issue... honestly, i think this is something the wider internet as a whole is struggling with.

to be clear, you're absolutely right that it's a wider tragedy that a lot of formerly public access content is being moved to more private discord servers. yahoo answers shutting down were a major loss for a lot of people, since it removed a huge resource for people who happened to be having the same problem in this the year of our lord 2023 that someone else had and solved back in 2008.

but i also don't think this problem is discord-specific. like i alluded to, yahoo answers going defunct was a huge example of exactly this and when reddit went on strike, we saw the same glaring problem with privatizing large swaths of knowledge on the internet. we've been seeing it on all fronts, as news sources have gone under or put access behind paywalls and as more sites have gone defunct or removed old content or otherwise made it more difficult to locate old content. twitter is limiting the amount of tweets you can view. tumblr dashboards no longer link to specific posts anymore. streaming sites are unlisting content to write them off as a loss, library systems are struggling in the face of amazon and audible, the video game industry has a stranglehold on old games + consoles they no longer sell, twitter is purging old accounts that haven't been used in x amount of time, archival sites are under attack in the name of preserving copyrights. the list goes on and on.

don't get me wrong, discord is definitely doing its fair part in pushing along that transition to make what used to be publicly accessible content into content that can only be accessed in semi-private spaces that aren't publicly searchable. but i think it's also negligent to ignore the fact that we are in a much wider context for this being a problem in the wider internet landscape. we are not in a great time in history in regards to archival and long-term access. and that's not likely to be a problem to get any better (hello potential twitter collapse removing large sections of the historical record of certain events!) without doing some large-scale changes in how we as a society handle the internet. so. yeah.

edit also whoops i beat around the bush that ace. actually got to for the fact that uh. y'know. forums can still be deleted or go into an offline mode you can't access as a long-former member. forum hosts can still go out entirely. jcink premium sites get locked once their premium subscription is no longer paid. this also has the exact same effect of preventing people from accessing old rp content if they didn't save it, so. accessing old rp content is also not #JustDiscordThings l-lol.