Not a single mention of discord despite it being a haven for neurodivergent people... I know the article is mainly about forums but IRC-style chats are very very closely related to forums.
I hate discord as a social network. The only thing I use it for is my weekly TTRPG group and messaging them. I can't understand how people enjoy using it as a place to just... Browse
The people who like discord, don't. At least I don't.
Discord for me is a place for small and medium-big groups. A place, not like social media, but like IRC. A place to make friends and get to know other people. And I have met tons of new people there! A lot of the people that are close to me now I have originally met through discord.
I despise Discord. It's an information black hole. Everything is closed off, unindexible, unscrapable, borderline unsearchable. If someone posts something useful on Discord, good luck finding it after a few months, let alone a few years. Meanwhile, I can find forum posts with useful info from over a decade ago. If Discord the company dies, everything on the platform dies with it. There's no internet archive for Discord.
It has a place as a chat app, but its use goes far beyond that. Some subreddits used it as a Reddit replacement, companies use it for tech support, and entire apps are built around it (eg. MidJourney).