For reddit specifically, I have to disagree. It's a sad state the Internet has become, where you used to get coherent results from decentralized blogs when you google a sufficiently niche hobbyist topic. These days you just get content marketing spam. Append reddit to your search and you get subject-matter experts. The valuable conversation and folk knowledge is all siloed on social media.
Reddit successfully centralised forums and made it convenient because you didn't need 20+ logins. The other half is link sharing/doom scrolling (the addictive stuff), which replaced Digg, Stumbleupon, etc.
In the not-so-distant past if you wanted expert help and non-astroturfed suggestions (or even just memes), that's where you went. Those places still exist for a lot of fields and the experts still hang out (and often are better than Reddit), but you still have the problem of finding them and managing identities across boards. In many cases the moderation is superior. Reddit now suffers from the problem where it's so big that people can run very subtle advertising campaigns to push products. It's still much better than blogspam, but you can still only really trust the negative/critical reviews.
Therein lies the problem... We spent so many years crowdsourcing these curated knowledge bases on a variety of subjects for free to the point that it's empowered the controlling companies to firewall them now and then make our input a commodity that they can turn around and sell to us.
Walled garden sites and apps are the enemy. The only way social media works for certain people is if they are off the main exploited niches on platforms. They take our words and ideas and give nothing back in return. They lie to us about what they can do for us in terms of creating a brand, or company, and they exploit our input and hinder growth.
We have to remember that each of us has a different perspective and purpose for using the web and for using social media.... It's not just people pushing motivational content and drop shipping, it's promoting music, or promoting a restaurant, or even turning their pet into a personality for movie roles. This is why too many people have just the narrow view of the matter that suits them most of the time... We need to understand that one mega platform with only one script and template for success dimply doesn't work, and it actually opens the field for exploitation and gaslighting about how to succeed on social media... That's also exactly what makes social media toxic, along with scams, fake users, cheating for followers, and the manipulation of visibility to encourage users to pay to promote their posts.
It's long overdue for everyone to wake up and take back their individual power in creating personal web sites and not looking back at social media. The ideal that large for profit companies care about individuals is bogus, and by the time people realized they've spent years building communities of profit for others, it's far too late. Time is money. Work is money. Social media does not pay for what you invest into it.
The funny thing is that a lot of the stuff people on Reddit are clamouring for was easily supported by forums, and has been done forever. Admins were free to run their own ads or premium posts, they got sponsorship from companies, organised swaps and real-life meetups. I remember getting perks like free shipping from some places in return for being an active user. The communities were also more intimate. You'd interact with the same people frequently and the water-cooler areas were also interesting to talk about related interests, whereas outside the novelty/karma farming accounts I don't really recognise anyone I interact with on Reddit (though probably in smaller subs that's more common).
I wonder if it would work if there was a good aggregation tool that could talk to old platforms like phpBB or vBulletin (which I think is still a big chunk of the communities that are running). I can't imagine it would be that difficult and probably existed.
Tapatalk is/was an attempt at such an aggregation tool for old-school forums. In addition to aggregation, it offered better UX for mobile. I haven't used it in many years though, I'm not sure what it looks like these days.
Who is the WordPress of forum hosting on your own domain and customizability? Someone that can make turnkey forums for nontechnical people to create their own communities.
This may sound strange (and was equally strange to admit to myself) but I'm looking forward to "mamaging identities acrosz multiple boards" again. My brain seems to be wired to associate each of my hobbies with very different aspects of my personality, and visiting a little "walled" community for whatevet activity suits that current version of myself is a nice way to compartmentalize and stay focused on what I set out to accomplish in that moment. I loved Reddit for a time, but goodness, what a disjointed experience it was for me and my easily distractable attention span.
In addition to the login bit, reddit/hn style threaded comments for conversation is way better UI (imo) than pages of slow loading quoting forum posts.
Threaded conversations is the killer feature of Reddit/HN for me. Second is that I don't need to shift between 20 different forum interfaces/color schemes. Old Reddit always looks the same, so long as you disable the ability of subreddits to mess with styling.
That's basically the major paint point for me at the moment. Reddit made finding subcultures related to my hobbies and interests very easy. I don't know where to find communities about things that interest me now. I thought maybe Mastodon but finding hashtags has also been difficult.
Social media is great for groups to form, but there is a ceiling to the success.
You need a dedicated website/forum with people that understand the subject, to get though the ceiling. You get very specific advertisers, organize your own in person meetings.
There are some platforms like Discourse which allow you to use OAuth. That's a reasonable setup I think, if you don't care about linking your real identity (or you just make a dummy account).
