Reddit of ten years ago focused on connecting users with the ideal user to communicate with. Modern Reddit focuses on connecting users with the ideal piece of information to read.

I don't know how they managed to make that change, when they were trying to optimize for user interaction, but it's the change they made, so now there's nothing unique about Reddit and a scrape of the information is just as useful.

If someone comes up with a good platform for online forums, there's a lot of potential to take over Reddit's husk.