Superiority of Asynchronous Visual Communication
The internet is fundamentally obsessed with immediacy, but genuine and deep intellectual exchange doesn't happen in a frantic rush. The finest thoughts require cognitive breathing room and a medium that respects human focus. Therefore, the ultimate online communication stack rests firmly on two specific pillars:
- Superiority of Asynchronous Communication
- Superiority of Visual Communication
Superiority of Asynchronous Communication ~
The biggest problem with synchrounous textual communication (like instant messaging) is that nobody thinks twice before speaking. Nobody attempts to formulate their own responses or think things through before sending a message, as all participants try to respond as soon as the interlocutor sends a message; you'll always feel pressured to respond instantly, so your response ends up being something you thought up on the spur of the moment, lacking real value and perhaps not being something you'd have said if you'd taken a moment longer to ponder over. Grammar and vocabulary are also lost due to the heavily usage of slang and abbreviations, and it's pathetic to keep watching language devolve from a medium of art to a limited and primitive work of slop.
Chat groups are even worse due to the "continuous chatroom" structure, as you simply can't just start a new topic of conversation with other people; either you participate in the current circlejerking subject (and promptly get ignored by people if you're a relatively new member) or you simply have to sit and wait patiently for an indefinite amount of time for the conversation to end before you can start something new, but since chat groups are either too big or too small, there's either never a moment of silence or nothing but a month's worth of constant mute horror. It's because of this that most chatrooms who emphasize on useless "member activity" and "constant presence" have become a horrible and unproductive time sink; constant lurking, swapping between different conversations, maintaining all of them at once, etc. This doesn't happen on IRC or XMPP when compared to Discord, as far as I've seen, so it's more of a cultural thing where people wish not to waste their times, and it's not a thing reserved for the "continuous chatroom" structure (although heavily facilitated by it).
On the other hand, asynchronous textual communication (such as emails and forums, especially in-person) allow for long-form, well-thought and articulated conversations, which give space to the mental regeneration of the participants. You aren't trapped in an endless loop of performative idle chatter; you contribute only when you actually have something substantial to say, allowing ideas to mature naturally over days rather than burning out in a chaotic stream of consciousness within minutes.
Superiority of Visual Communication ~
While real-time (i.e., synchronous) voice communication over the internet is great if I'm doing something important that I can't get my eyes off of, like multiplayer gaming or watch-along sessions, it's a way less superior form of communication than visual/textual means, because audible communication hinders you from having multiple discussions, requires you to drop everything and focus on speech so that people don't reiterate statements, and it's used sometimes as a tool to mock people, de-anonymize and reveal their identities, conventionally interrupt them, raise their voices above them, and is just harder to consume and follow up with. Voice message (i.e., asynchronous) communication are even more of a no-go; not only do they suffer from the above problem, but also they're impossible to search by their contents, take more bandwidth as well as storage space, make archival even more difficult, and they're almost always received at the worst moments possible where I'm not ready to listen to them (e.g., being in public spaces). This applies to podcasts and recordings; not only do they suffer from all the above points, but they're also boring and hard to keep up with. This is why I won't upload any sort of audible or audio-visual media to this site, unless for entertainment or documentation.
A better form of "visual" communication is "textual" communication; non-textual media such as images (and especially animated videos) are just as bloated as audio, so the above problems apply, and they also completely alienate anyone relying on a screen reader (such as blind people). Hence, plain text and images to an extent are the only sane lightweight standards; reading static text or viewing images gives you total control over your own parsing speed, while listening to audio or watching videos forces you to sit there and be a hostage to someone else's tempo.