I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features. Tags function as sections. You can sort threads chronologically. Karma.

I suspect there's no actual difference, the author just liked the sort of people who were willing to deal with the traditional "crappy forum" interface for the sake of connecting around some niche hobby, and it provided enough friction to promote adherence to the community's culture.

There are just more people on the internet now. The problem always boils down to some version of Eternal September.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

The differences aren't chiefly technical. They are cultural, as you alluded to. I started out using BBSes then usenet and email lists then forums and now reddit, for an overlapping set of hobbies. I can tell you with certainty that the subreddits about those hobbies are a pale shadow of what existed on ANY of the prior discussion platforms.

The volume of conversation might be higher, but the depth and sophistication is lower. The repetition of clueless questions. The endless posting of the same joke responses rather than actually answering questions. And so on.

All of that stuff existed on forums and usenet and other places too. I'm not saying it didn't. It's just that the proportions have shifted. And I think like you said the friction is part of it.

It's not just the interface. It's that effectively "everyone" has an account on Reddit. So if they stumble into random niche subreddit because the algorithm suggested it or someone linked to it or it popped up in a search result, in two clicks they can be posting their own new posts or replies in that very niche community. With standalone forums, it was both less likely that you'd just stumble across them if you weren't specifically interested in the topic, and the bar for starting to participate was much higher.

Even if there were no real restrictions on joining or posting, just creating a new account is a lot more work than participating in a subreddit when you already have a reddit account. You could argue that the same dynamic existed in usenet, but the overall bar for participating in usenet was so much higher, and the global userbase so much smaller than what reddit has. And still, we did in my experience see a lot more of the kind of garbage participation that comes from people who aren't really interested in or knowledgeable the topic being able to participate with zero marginal effort.

An extremely low barrier to participation creates a radically different culture than a situation where you actually have to want to be there before you contribute.

It's not just about how many people are on the internet now. There are still a handful of niche forums I participate in, and maybe they aren't as good as they used to be, but they're still way better than most subreddits.

The main thing is the old forums were sorted by recency (how new a post was or how recently it was replied to) rather than some AI-driven engagement mechanism. They were structured (you'd have several rooms for different topics on the same forum).

The crappy forums don't have to let anyone register without a vouching process if they don't want to. They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed by a mob of overly-enthusiastic or angry strangers who don't know or follow the community's etiquette.

> I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features.

There's a lot of differences and they show up all the time with subreddits trying to poorly emulate the full featured organizational flexibility of a traditional forum.

The short answer is there's no subsubreddits, or subsubsubreddits, which are normal in forums, and turn out to be useful or even necessary.

What happens in the subs are classes of content posted repeatedly, members of the subs complaining about this repetitiveness, asking to have it removed, and so forth. The mods are torn because the posts are clearly popular but they do swamp the sub, and so you end up with "daily threads" about x or y. But this doesn't quite work because they're hard to search and aren't what you really need, which are subforums and subsubforums.

See e.g., r/running which was decimated by an attempt to reorganize it with the severe limitations of Reddit. If it was a forum, it would be really obvious how to organize it.

Reddit is pointing in the right direction in emulating traditional forums but doesn't have the same depth.

This doesn't even get into what I see as the harms of downvoting — sometimes I think it works better to just allow emoji reactions to posts, instead of upvoting and downvoting points (although maybe it's not upvoting and downvoting that's the problem, it's the way it's implemented?)

Personally I don't think what's needed really exists yet, or hasn't taken off: a decentralized version of Reddit that allows for more subnesting. Mastodon has features of this too but not really the nesting part at all.

The difference between forum and a subreddit or discord isn't ultimately the features, it's localism. A forum can make it's own rules whereas Reddit ultimately makes the rules for a subreddit.

Forums aren’t subject to Reddit’s capital aligned tactics. Forums have a sign up barrier meaning the discussion is not at risk to random people not-interested in the forum topic can’t pile on to and troll your forum without work.

The people who are willing to work with a “crappy forum” ui are more likely interested in the topics being discussed, not the fluidity of the platform.

Very different and distinct intents even though the features might be the same.