It’s true but things did change meaningfully. Before you could read forums discussions, mailing lists threads going for weeks or months on a topic. The content wasn’t optimized, it was between some people chatting/debating without the expectation of a larger audience. Same for blog. Not to say the quality was always great (blog comment sections were notoriously extremely low quality, I spent way too much time having the dumbest exchanges there) but you had some interesting things to search and look for. All current platforms (not HN) are full of cropped Twitter posts with cynical commentary that you consume in a few seconds or minutes (if you read the comment) before you scroll to the next one. Even if you go to smaller subreddit the discussions are dominated by whatever is the latest thing someone said on some other platform (still so much of Reddit is made of cropped twitter screenshots…), there is very limited actual engagement with the content. No interaction between whatever is posted (very likely out of context) and the original author. Virtually nobody ever interact with a discussion slightly older than a few hours.

Vlogs and discord content cannot be searched and found through serendipity. How are you supposed to discover those discussions?

I don’t think people spend that much time online because they have fun to be honest