After some questionable takes lately we got good one from Kotaku.
Readers are then urged to move to the site's Discord, because of course they would be. Now, I don't want to pick on Eurogamer here, as like I said up top, in every individual case companies and sites have their reasons for doing this, and the most frequently cited are the fact that forums need to be maintained (true!) and that people's conversational habits have changed, with forum use dwindling (also true!).
But I simply do not care, because a) I don't work for these companies, and b) I'm more interested in looking at the long-term damage this is doing to the internet. Forums and Discord are apples and oranges. Users aren't being moved from one similar thing to another, they're being shifted to platforms with fundamentally different ways of approaching discussions.
Discord is great for talking in the moment. It's a place for real-time conversations (or at lease those a few hours old if they're not as busy), a fancy way to manage multiple chat rooms and voice comms, and if that's what you want—and millions of people around the world do, for loads of needs and wants—then great!
Forums aren't the same though. They're nothing like it. Forums are more deliberate, more considered, and while they're far from perfect—I'm sure you can post a billion examples of people being neither deliberate or considered on forums—the point is that they're more permanent.
