Exacly! And that’s why the future of all forums is… not so bright. Bright in the meaning we have a platform to discuss. The whole scene is going back to SMSs, chat and passive consumption of content.
It is wonderful we have chat in Discourse. But it is not improvement. It is something that every platforms are heading to now. Well, that is reality nowadays and I realize why Discourse as company took that step. But please, it has nothing to do with quality content, or with content at all. It is just meaningless small talk.
But that’s how things are, and that’s the reason why we can’t beat social media without being part of it — sure, that is one direction, but there you/we are several miles behind all others.
People don’t want to use audio. Most of users don’t want to do video either. Perhaps someday speech-to-text works with other languages than english (and even english is not so top notch) and it can change playfield big time. But it is not Discourse’s job.
So, the only logical, and technically, direction is understand, that most of users never create anything. That is one reason why creating an account is so… last decade 
Conversation per se will be, and is already, only enjoy of few and everyone else just sit there and follow.
That’s why three major operations must be
- make creation of all kind of content as easy as possible
- tools must be targeted for creators, and commenting must use different toolbox
- all devices must be served, and mobiles come first
Forums are relics from pre-facebook era. Now same platforms must be… like WordPress with commenting, but much better. And we all know, or should know, how succesful commenting on WP-sites are…
Sorry — I don’t remember anymore where we started 