I'd counter that point though, and say 'then you should be/stay on topic' and not forking the discussion into other topics. It's certainly not difficult to create a new topic about a related discussion, and if it interests the original posters then yay, they might join in, but either way you aren't cluttering up the original discussion.

I see forums as more... professional? Whereas layouts like we have here are much more 'lol memes'. The two types serve two different users.

I spent a good chunk of my teen years on forums and it was definitely a direct, 'here is A Thing and I want to discuss A Thing' conversations. Lemmy/reddit comments are like 'I have this one thought of a kinda-tangible idea for A Thing 2' and it's just... It's not 'bad', but it's most definitely scatterbrain thoughts, just shared for other wandering thoughts to collide. Scribbled brainstorming vs careful planning, I guess? I dunno.

Maybe I'm just old. Blah.

If youre reading from the top though, you have all the references of what people would be responding to (especially with quotes), and youre reading in order of reply.

I still prefer threaded conversations, but I can recognize the appeal of single thread conversations.