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Whilst I don't disagree, I have the server stats and cache hit stats that show this place was nearly always "stuff posted in the last week"
Context shapes things, and I'd argue that the existence of the older and wider content shaped the ephemeral chat, but Discord doesn't even scale to the many subforums and threads here. This forum thrived and brought many people in despite a misanthropic core of assholes who even tried to sabotage the compass drinks idea, because they didn't want anybody who wasn't here in 2007 to be involved at all. Discord doesn't scale in a way that gives that much room.
Whilst I don't disagree, I have the server stats and cache hit stats that show this place was nearly always "stuff posted in the last week", and that very seldom did any person look at stuff older than that. In fact, it happened so seldom that my LRU caches would be empty of that content when a crawler came around, which is why the crawlers impacted us so much. The caches are big, the content just expired out.
Ephemeral chat is the bulk of what people do... though of course it's amazing to search for something and pull up an old thread that answers it perfectly, or to cite a joke from a decade ago, etc... it just wasn't done that often.
I'm sure you'll anecdotally say you do it constantly... that's great, but the vast majority didn't.