[mad182]

IMHO it's not so much of a problem with google search, but the internet as a whole.

Most genuine discussions have moved from open, publicly accessible web to places inaccessible to search engines and general public. Smaller niche forums, blogs and personal websites with no financial incentive have died out. People have moved to Facebook, Discord, Whatsapp, Instagram, Slack, Twitter and other places behind logins. Online newspapers and portals are increasingly using paywalls. Most of the genuine human interactions and quality content is not indexable anymore. Instead we have a million affiliate marketers fighting for the top positions in search results with every possible seo trick.

Reddit is one of the last places with huge amounts of publicly accessible online discussions.

[Gigachad]

It's because private communities are the only ones free from mass abuse. Public forums moved to private discord groups with hard to find invite links / etc because public forums take an army of anti abuse workers to keep alive. While a discord group just needs a few people to kick the trouble makers and maybe revoke the invite link for a while.

[throwamon]

If that's the entire problem, then why not make these forums read-only by default (while still keeping them publicly viewable) and hand out invite links as in Discord?

Lobste.rs, for instance, has an interesting "invite tree" concept where your reputation is bound to people you've invited and who they've invited and so on.

[chestervonwinch]

> Reddit is one of the last places with huge amounts of publicly accessible online discussions.

There are still some pretty active enthusiast message boards, e.g., https://www.tacomaworld.com

But your overall point is valid, I think. My pointing to a single active forum doesn't change the fact that many of other enthusiast groups have moved to facebook groups and the like.

[pie_flavor]

Feature, not bug. If there's no public search, it can't be gamed for money. The problem TFA identifies is one of discerning that the person you're getting your info from is an actual person, who cares. The best way of doing that, until we find some way of creating institutional trust in these matters, is talking to the sort of person that spends all day in talking to a chat room about whatever it is you're asking about.