Reddit

I don't really understand why reddit pretty much succeeded in killing off all other forums. People love the format of reddit so much that even after killing off all the supporting apps it hasn't really done much at all to cause people to go back to traditional forums. I've personally always found reddit far worse than a traditional forum because of the like system. This place has it as well, although I'm not sure how it compares to reddit's in terms of algorithm.

Traditional forums did not have it. You just saw posts sequentially. There was also no character limit. This meant on traditional forums everyone's position was not only presented equally but you could also go into as much detail as you wanted. If the topic is complex you could write basically an essay if you wanted, which in reddit you have to break up into multiple posts. Reddit's like system also tends to facilitate echo chambers because popular opinions show up first while unpopular opinions show up last and can even be hidden, and it encourages people to misrepresent you and not act in good faith because they're looking for an "own" to farm likes rather than a real discussion.

Sure, there might be sometimes when a person's opinion is so out there and disingenuous you don't even want to take it seriously and have a real discussion, but I've never once in my entire history of using reddit had a decent conversation with someone. Even things as benign as like /r/nintendo, I say I enjoyed a game and I got a bunch of people shitting on me calling me a bad person for liking a particular game. No matter how benign and non-serious the topic is, people always find ways to turn it into an attack to "own" you to farm upvotes.