> But they're so few.

Given how many subreddits there, I have to ask if you have statistics to back up this claim.

My intuition is that people have problems with a bunch of popular subreddits, but the vast majority of subreddits are just fine. I have no statistics to back up this intuition.

Do you?

There are two problems in computer science, accepting payments and naming things.

Reddit's principal problem is that the first person to take r/foo is often a BDFL for foo for life, and no other subreddit about foo will ever be quite as recognizable. If we instead had subreddits with a numeric ID and a non-unique display name, that problem would be solved.

Payments would also solve the spam problem, but many users who have $1 can't easily get that $1 to Reddit, so that's not really an option either.

Admins actively choose moderators, removing ones they don't like and inserting their favorites. Recently, a mod was removed from r/LivestreamFails and made a public crashout video. In exactly the way you'd expect a Reddit mod to.

Reddit recently announced a change that capped the number of large subreddits than any individual can moderate. It might reduce this problem.

I don't necessarily agree, the Rust subreddit is fine (except for all the AI slop posts this year, which the moderators have a hard time keeping up with) and some of the more niche 3D printing subreddits are doing fine, basically it feels like the past few years haven't happened there. The Arch Linux subreddit is a bit chaotic, but the moderation is not really the problem I think.

Maybe all of these fall into your last paragraph and I simply don't frequent the type of subreddit you describe. The thing is, it is hard to tell if it is you or me who have a representative sample here, or if we are both off. Two samples is not statistically significant.

Here's one of 'em [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E36G9QOolxk [video][12 mins]

Requiring a valid payment method before posting will take out 99.9% of spammers and trolls. Newspapers discovered this when they went behind paywalls. SomethingAwful discovered this 20 years ago when they required $10 to create an account.

Also survived the great cancellation [1]

[1] - https://www.somethingawful.com/cliff-yablonski/i-hate-you-01...

There's also sufficientvelocity, its offshoot.

Absolutely avoid all the extensions. Supposedly that got tightened up in v3.x but I saw some boards get pwned in 2.x from the extensions. Another issue is that most people were too lazy to harden php.ini yup this is a thing and their servers allowed outbound connections so exploiting some of the core code was much easier. Maybe I am just lucky but I never had a security issue with phpBB. One of my earliest forums using phpBB had over 50k people on it. That may not sound like much but it was a niche community and very early in the Internets existence.

The legal landscape has also changed.

It did change a lot but the biggest changes were the ToS/AuP of server/VM providers. What was not even taboo in the early 00's was becoming a problem keeping an account active on clear-web sites. Across the board many providers starting using the vague word "lewd" a word I had never heard of even after running porn sites for a long time.

Many of us moved to .onion despite being incredibly slow at the time. We would keep an unpublished clear-web sub-domain active for the old time users so they had a fast connection. Eventually that was even problematic so many forum operators stopped accepting new users and made their forums private or semi-private. Some still exist and some got married, had kids and real life took too much time and energy to also run such sites.

You are shielded from liability if you respond to abuse reports.

DMCA was already a thing 20 years ago?

We can’t have threaded conversations because that would elevate some users and subordinate other’s comments.

Everyone is equal and hierarchy is bad.

For phpBB site behavior, access control lists, ranks unless discourse has added that, per board policies, per rank policies. I have not used Discourse in a long time so I have no idea what they have added but that was the difference long ago.

Except you're doing nothing about that besides going "let's keep the town square terrible" and ensuring kids are 100% unprepared for the way the modern world communicates in the 21st century lol