Gerard Westendorp on Nostr: My feeling is that the “interesting discussion ecosystem” is a decline is not ...

My feeling is that the “interesting discussion ecosystem” is a decline is not because of the quality of the content. It is more because of the social network structure.
For me the golden age was the time of sci.physics.research and sci.math.research newsgroups. Maybe this was because the number people in the newsgroup was similar to the number of people in an ancient hunter gatherer tribe, say 100 people. Like in a movie there are some main characters, but also every now and them a mysterious outsider pops up. Another factor was that there was basically no other place. There was the unmoderated versions sci.physics and sci.math, but they were a bit polluted with junk.
I quite liked Google Plus. You had kind of you own page with content, and from there you could comment on other people’s pages. A bit like Twitter, but Twitter is more like a giant shopping mall, whereas Google plus felt more like a Bazaar, where you know the main salespeople.
Now you have quite a few platforms: Mastodon, BlueSky, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, and probably some I forgot to mention. Also, many people have their own weblog or Youtube channel. So there are plenty of “shops”, but the shops are not so much a social place anymore.
I think Mathstodon.xyz could actually be a solution, but it just needs some more publicity. Maybe a free beer for anyone who does a cool reply on some particular post...
Apart from that, there is the problem that things often get interesting when you spend a couple of hours thought on them. But there are only so many things that you can spend time on. So sometimes you skip a really cool post. For me personally, I find that quite frustrating.