User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/The future of Chat/@comment-35455167-20200806061021

The only reason this makes a blip on my radar is the circled 1 on the bell icon near the upper right of my screen. Forums and article comments (and Discussions to replace both of those in UCP) directly attached to a wiki make sense, as it's relatively easy to steer the conversation in a direction that is directly productive to the wiki. To have a well-curated active discussion of any kind about a subject broad enough to have a wiki, separate channels for separate topics is important, though there can be some overlap between separate channels. If it isn't important to split the conversations like this, the discussion isn't all that active.

Whether you call it Forum or Discussions, splitting the conversation into several channels is what a forum does, and that's what happens naturally with article comments (the channel's topic being the article). Even IRC allows you to do that. It sounds like Special:Chat does not do that, so I guess what I'm saying is that I don't really get why there would be any hysteria over the loss of Special:Chat, maybe aside from nostalgia. It sounds to me like a rational choice of dead weight to prune, given the finite resources. But I was hardly aware that Special:Chat even existed prior to this blog post, so if I have a bias, it's that I'm agnostic to "what it's really like". ¯\(o.°)/¯