But Reddit is great for niche hobbies or topics. The subreddits are much smaller and more manageable to moderate without needing full-time influencers to moderate. The sweet spot seems to be around 100,000 subscribers with a few hundred active at any time; at that size you have enough new content that the default view isn’t static, but not so much that you get lost in the noise. As for being time-based, forums suffer from this as well — if your post reply isn’t on the first or last page, it’s probably not getting read.

Forums suffer from significant bitrot — particularly when images are involved. A sizeable percentage of those useful forum posts from 10 years ago aren’t really useful anymore because all the images are gone and the links are dead. Reddit at least has a centralized infrastructure that is actively maintained.

Furthermore, accounts can be anonymous and not linked to e-mail which limits the blast radius of any data leaks (which are VERY common once a forum starts to fall behind on patching). For relatively niche topics, Reddit is probably the best option.

For example, consider a PC hardware subreddit/forum. Let's assume people repeatedly (every few days) ask certain common questions such as "Should I buy the SuPerB A100 or A200 CPU?" or "Should I go for 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM?" or "Is the stock CPU cooler sufficient for the A200 CPU?" [1] Essentially, questions often asked by relatively inexperienced users which are - to some extent - obvious to the subreddit/forum veterans.

In Forums, moderators often close threads with those questions with comments like "This has already been answered 100 times - research your question first". Unfortunately, exactly these topics are invariably going to show up first in your favorite search engine. And the built-in search function of most forums is borderline unusable, or gated behind registration (which IMHO is an anti-feature, I don't know who came up with that idea).

In Subreddits, moderators create mega-threads for simple questions, with the effect that you have weekly giant threads that totally unorganized (since it's just a random collection of hundreds of unrelated questions) and unsearchable. Especially considering Reddit's search function has also turned useless at some point: I sometimes try to use it to look for terms that have definitely been mentioned a lot of times in a certain subreddit (e.g. searching for "Linux" in a Linux subreddit), but the search still didn't turn up any results.

I guess one of the better ways to provide typical, standard answers to common questions is the Q&A format (Stack Overflow), but that comes with its own pitfalls.

[1] After writing these examples, I realized they might not be optimal since those questions often do rely on the context (e.g. "Use 32 GB of RAM if you run a lot of VMs/use $memory_hungry_software, otherwise 16 GB is enough") - but let's assume for a moment these questions have clear standard answers.

I am reading a manga and there's a reddit sub for it. Until a year ago give or take we were like 30 or 40. The manga was slowly moving the storyline but it picked up again and now there are tens of thousands of people. When there were only 30-40 people there used to be a stupid puerile joke related to the manga. You could see it once a week, or maybe in a lot of posts but quickly drowned or irrelevant anyway since only person did it. It was not mentioned much.

Now with all those people ? That supid joke/meme is present in every post, every comments. Every new chapter release gets many comments with that dumb joke.

I also feel like comments are now shorter and story theories much simpler and... well, quality is reduced. As you said, predictable comments are ruining the fun.

And to read anything you are almost required to be logged in because of the threading mechanism, just trying to do use find in the browser is annoying.

I'm using i.reddit.com right now and it seems to be working just fine.

I have been using i.reddit.com for years on mobile. It works great.