I've often wondered why people use Reddit for stuff like this since the information and conversation management and organizational tools seem vastly inferior to most any pre-Reddit forum software.

My current working theory is largely that internet search is just broken. It's easier to search for subreddit once you're on Reddit than to wade out into the sea of SEO crap and try to find a live, reliable format on the broader web. Google+search+display ads at scale killed the web, now we're back to AOL.

Reddit also offloads the complexity of forum management from moderators and removes the friction of registration.

If you want to create a traditional forum, you have to figure out how to host it, what forum software you want to use, how that software works, how to configure it, etc. If you get attacked by spammers, hackers, or trolls, you have to figure out how to stop that more or less from scratch. It requires a significant amount of technical knowledge, time, and money to make it work.

Then, even if you use a dedicated forum hosting service, your forum is still basically on an island. You have to find a userbase and attract them, convince them to register dedicated accounts for your forum specifically, and keep them coming back, which is really hard if you don't have an existing userbase to make your forum compelling in the first place.

With Reddit, nearly all of that goes away. Creating a subreddit is extremely easy and costs nothing but time. Moderators still have to moderate, but they don't have to figure out how to manage forum software or handle DDoS attacks. Since any Reddit user can join and participate in any subreddit, and since posts appear on users' homepages in one feed, communities can grow much more quickly and are less likely to die out due to inactivity. And there's only one UI for the whole site, so users don't have to learn how to use whatever random forum software each site has chosen.

What, you don't want to sign up for 27 different forums, all using their own variations of CRUDs?

The solution to Reddit is a similarly centralized approach managed instead in the style of Wikipedia (not suggesting exactly replicating their governance, rather something generally akin to Wikipedia's not-for-profit direction).

People use Reddit because the alternative is blogspam. When I try to find DIY or home improvement advice, I see the same points repeated without much detail. The articles are intended to push Amazon affiliate links or other services.

I want to see real problems other homeowners are facing and the knowledge many other homeowners have to fix it. That's not something I see on any platform other than Reddit.

Unfortunately, it's practically impossible to find real individuals discussing things via Google. It's all promoted content and blogspam.

A long time ago, Google used to have a filter you could select for "forums". Once that disappeared, we had the "+reddit" hack. Now what? I have no idea.

My recollection is that during the Google+ period, Google changed their indexing and basically destroyed every other forum. Things that were first page results dropped out completely and lost virtually all of their ad revenue.

> My current working theory is largely that internet search is just broken. It's easier to search for subreddit once you're on Reddit than to wade out into the sea of SEO crap and try to find a live, reliable format on the broader web. Google+search+display ads at scale killed the web, now we're back to AOL.

This is clearly the reason in my eyes. I append "reddit" to most of search queries not because reddit always has the best advice/information, but because the alternative is usually wading through page after page of SEO blog spam. Even if I know the information is better found somewhere else, I can usually find that somewhere else from reddit.

Want to compare headphones? Search returns blog spam. Computer components? Blog spam. Software framework or library question? Blog spam. Healthcare / Medicine? 1000 government / hospital websites that all give the same useless information. Nutrition? Blog spam. Every search results is either endless affiliate spam blogs or endless blogs all sharing the same trivial parts about a topic.

It's possible that there is a ton of useful information on the internet, but it's certainly not easy to find. It's amazing to me that Reddit failed to take advantage of their position as quasi internet hub, and seem to just want to be yet another endless content scroller app.

Reddit also largely offers a uniform browsing experience, single starting point, and single log in. The comment tree can be easier to have side conversations in and although subreddit names sometimes fall in this trap, hobby forums had/have all kinds of whacky names which make discovery hard. Reddit primarily lacks the in comment photo display of old style forums.

Everyone uses Reddit because everyone uses Reddit. Most people old enough to remember forums agree that forums were a dramatically better solution, but they're generally dead now (with some exceptions). Discourse is almost entirely Reddit or Facebook these days.

Forums were and are generally terrible. When you get a forum in a Google result, or for some topics where forums still are a major way to distribute information, usually you get a crowd of uninformed but confident people, paginated poorly, with a bunch of dead links. The worst is people who write or distribute code and use forum posts as a substitute for version control. That is still a thing in some niches.

I can't agree that forums is dramatically better. I know/remember the feeling when you opens thread in forum with title that you are interested in just to see 200+ pages of slowly ongoing flamewar and spam.

Why do you think forums died? It wasn't because everyone serendipitously decided to switch to a dramatically worse system.

When Twitter went crazy, there was a clear migration path 'Just use Mastodon'[1]. With Reddit shut down, there's no clear alternative for communities to migrate to.

You say forums are clearly superior? Are you volunteering to operate r/seattle (or whatever community you/I care about), and its 100-500,000 users as a phpbb board? I sure as hell ain't...

[1] I mean, there are problems with that migration path, but they are significantly smaller than migrating a large subreddit to a forum. Reddit, both pre- or post-enshittification is still the path of least resistance for running a community, which is why people who put in the time to run communities use it, over self-hosting. It wasn't 'dramatically worse' for the people that mattered.

Forums still rule for discourse content for some subjects. Some of them are basically grand-fathered in because Google will surface them and their communities started before Reddit. Guitar gear is one of those. There are still half a dozen forums that provide way better discourse than Reddit. I imagine a big part of that is because the users are an older age group.

> I've often wondered why people use Reddit for stuff like this since the information and conversation management and organizational tools seem vastly inferior to most any pre-Reddit forum software.

Phpbb-style forums are a mess. Simultaneously too ordered and not ordered enough - you don't get threaded replies, but you do have to put everything in the right topic and the right forum. No notifications that do the right thing.

For years I remember forum makers refusing to offer a "just notify me when someone's replied to my question, otherwise don't bother me" feature on the grounds that it would destroy participation. IMO the main reason Reddit won is that it offered just that.

As a way to create a community "I want to ignore anything that isn't a direct answer to a specific question" is something of an anti-feature.

I've never made lasting connections with people from Reddit/HN for exactly that reason.

I wonder if that's gonna work against the boycott here. If for most people Reddit is more StackOverflow question+answer + TV (mindless background scrolling) than a sticky community/communities, than that will make mass migration that much harder to coordinate and manage.

Using forum you have to scroll via dozens of pages while trying to follow discussion by reading separate comments divided by other comments. With reddit tree structure of comments you can easy and quickly follow discussion and votes helps you understand of significancy of each comments. Same as in HN btw.

Google SEO. The first thing people often do is search for something on Google. The first result(s) are often Reddit