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Comment by xemdetia | Hacker News Reader

Mostly everything you described in that list was something that most web forums and usenet provided, but they were supplanted with a mix of on-article comments and social media in it's current state. It is frustrating to have seen most forums end up evaporating but they are just hard to keep momentum in.

It would be really nice to see someone figure out a good way to bring forums back in a way that didn't turn into a black hole.

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As a heavy forum user (since the late 90s), I find reddit supplanted them. Reddit is basically every forum I've ever been a part of, all on a single website. More importantly, it's every forum I didn't even know existed, on a single website. I found many niche hobbies and interests I wouldn't have otherwise found thanks to reddit.

I think that's why reddit grew so large, so quick. It does what forums do (provides similar discussions), except better.

I agree that reddit supplanted most of them for particular niches but building a community around a few niches doesn't seem to work well. You can't really combine r/ArtisanVideos, r/programming and r/ECE into one 'whole' where a forum such as the EEVBlog or the RPF can combine these more diverse things into a more cohesive community with more users overlapping.

Reddit definitely does better as 'front page of the community' but there are less 100's of posts over 2 months to a single entry on reddit that happen without a moderator's pin.

> It would be really nice to see someone figure out a good way to bring forums back in a way that didn't turn into a black hole.

Isn't that what Reddit is trying to do? Creating a subreddit seems to be the default way to stand up a new forum. Whether the platform is up to the task.... jury is still out.

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