[thinbeige]

Wouldn't call it a die off, more a consolidation: reddit got some really good niche communities and if you want to narrow it even further down Discord evolved quite well in this regard (great communities + easy access to multiple groups unlike with Slack).

[qPM9l3XJrF]

As a software platform, subreddits are inferior to traditional forums. Upvoting/downvoting facilitates groupthink and tribalism. "Hot" algorithm encourages popcorn content over in-depth discussions which continue over an extended period of time. User mixing with reddit at large disrupts community feel. Dollars to donuts the Foo Fighter subreddit won't result in any marriages any time soon.

[tjpnz]

Downvoting has turned me off Reddit. Often it's just downright petty and results in an overly dull experience. I'm what they would call a Liberal in the US but will often try to read opinions from the other side - Reddit labels those as "Controversial". I've occasionally committed "wrongthink" there myself and it's rather disheartening to know that few will ever read what I had to say. It's no wonder that contrarians have all but abandoned the platform.

I find it interesting that HN also has downvotes yet somehow manages to not have the same vibe.

[PaulKeeble]

The algorithm for hot is really toxic. As a community gets bigger the content that more people review and engage with is the simplest of content such as pictures and Memes and it comes to completely dominate a sub past about 10,000 users. So communities have to create rules and consistently moderate such simple content out to maintain a baseline of quality which always expels the highest quality longer form content.

[TheAdamAndChe]

For a while there, reddit replaced forums for me. But then they became Reddit™ and have become so user-hostile and partisan that I can't stand the site anymore.

Discord is a place for synchronous communication, so it doesn't fill quite the same niche that reddit and forums filled for me.

[gempir]

I think it's awful Discord is used in that way. Discord is not indexed by Google or other searchengines. All the content will slowly be forgotten.

Typescript has very big Discord server full of useful information and help threads which would be super nice to be able to find via Google. So I hope either Discord starts creating "crawable" channels or communities start moving away from Discord again.

[tannhaeuser]

Consolidation, as in: forums that naturally attracted visitors with their focussed content and having acceptable content-based ads without tracking (or only basic visitor counters) were obsoleted by forum aggregators with targetted advertising and invasive tracking making up their own play-out stats to get customers paying more for ads and devaluing content-based ads