Where do you go have discussions? I go <i>read</i> quality discussions on reddit and yc. I say <i>read</i> because it is very rare for me to use anything other than mobile, and I am biased to having discussions only when I have a keyboard at hand. There seems to be a lot of discussion that goes on in 'ephemeral' places, like comment sections. Are comment sections really the meat of a site? How about IRC? Do you use newsgroups?
Pick a topic: as an example, lets use the recent Net Neutrality repeal. Spread through the net there is a layer of comment sections in fb, g+, disqus, yc, etc that can be said to hold the people's opinion about the topic. Yet this feels so disorganized and redundant. Multiple debates, orthogonally repeating the same arguments, without really caring that the other threads exist. Is this the end of the line for discussions on the net? Is twitter a step up from that or a step down? Or does the answer lie in federated networks?
How about when you search for stuff? Are you still googling? How do you feel about feeding the spider? Did you try more private search engines? How did your search for better search end up? I tried yacy for a few weeks and it was an interesting experience. All in all, i came back to google, either because I have become needy of the way it answers my queries or the quality of the search results.