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Comment by oofnik | Hacker News Reader

I would say Reddit, more so than any other of the potential replacements you mentioned, has taken on the role of hosting topic-based discussion which used to be the domain of forums.

It's part of the relentless push toward greater resource allocation efficiency. Just as it is orders of magnitude more efficient to distribute perishable goods through a centralized corporate supermarket chain rather than a patchwork of independent corner markets, Reddit reduces the total amount of operations overhead that once went in to maintaining thousands of independent vBulletin / phpBB / Discourse instances in the aggregate.

With all the recent talk about supply chain resilience and the inherent trade-offs necessary to improve it, one might wonder whether such considerations might be weighed differently going forward.

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In addition: From a users perspective having one account for reddit which replaces x accounts for specialized forums makes things easier such as managing notifications, etc.

These centralized sites makes it easier to stick around.

That forum I signed up for in 2012? I don’t remember the name.

That Facebook group I joined in 2012? I still see the occasional post in the feed.

Also it’s vastly easier to find these communities in the first place. There’s no way to look for forums about a specific topic, if that exists at all.

> From a users perspective having one account for reddit which replaces x accounts for specialized forums makes things easier such as managing notifications, etc.

Forum platforms could offer the same feature by interoperating with the Fediverse. You can sign up on one server and use that one identity to post content elsewhere. (Plus it also addresses the issue of needing a mobile native UX, there's plenty of apps that can interact with the Fediverse.)

Notifications are just one aspect. As mentioned by others discoverability is another. An independent forum has to compete with commercial sites and well the entire www regarding search engine placement to be found.

That said, a lot of communities seem to be migrating to Discord as well, which has a discoverability many times worse than forums, as Discord 'servers' are not even publicly accessible.

Could, yes, but that's besides the point of WHY this has happened

Because the Fediverse is quite new and forums haven't gotten around to adopting it, even though they would naturally benefit from this tech.

Also I would not underestimate the power of push notifications. Forums don't come with their own app and notifications out of the box.

I loved forums because they used to be much smaller than subreddits. Also, for me forums UX was much better. Big trees of comments hard to follow.

What I enjoy about forums is that everyone can have their 100 vertical pixels to say something in a certain topic, and that gives it a feel of "contributing to the conversation" to the whole thing.

You can just say "I also have these headphones and love them" and that adds value to the whole thing.

Maybe its just a factor of being small like you said.

In reddit/hn/twitter one feels ignored most of the time - no upvotes and feel like no one has read what you typed. Why did you even type it?

(I know this is the issue with forums that reddit-style sites fix...)

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