alt Hacker NewsMost older forums had an element of self-selection... people don't hang out where they're not wanted. But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere. This forces to some extent people who would gravitate away from each other, and personalities go overboard. There's more need of a judicial process there, than there would be elsewhere. And that was before everything became politically polarized. Now that you could be perfectly happy talking to someone about X, you still end up hating their guts because they love/hate Trump/Obama and it slips out (over a long enough timespan).
People do not scale.
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> But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics) so you're either there or nowhere.
Reddit wasn't even that good as a community space in the first place. It was a content aggregator with user-moderated comment sections, and those make for pretty awful communities because on anything remotely controversial you get factions dog piling each other trying to hide each other's posts.
That said, communities are all on discord now, and quite honestly I think it's for the better. It gives moderators a lot more discretion, but balances the scales by making it very easy to create new servers where one can invite like-minded people and grow organically.
Reddit always was a flawed place
But with Reddit, it's the only forum left (for any number of broad and narrow topics)
What are some examples? In my experience there are numerous other communities of various types for any given interest. Reddit is just kind of a convenient surface level a lot of the time.