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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
