[Isthatablackgsd]

Largely to blame for the fall of public web forums is moderation. It always boils down to moderation. Moderating forums is not an easy task. I used to be a forum moderator 20 years ago for 2D MMORPG forum, I have difficult time to moderate a forum that have over 20k registered users with over hundred sub-forums. With moderation team, it is still difficult to moderate professionally and clean.

Majority of the moderation are volunteering position, meaning they don't get paid to moderate those sites. Reddit plagued with this issue, there are power mods that moderating 50 or 100 subs. The reason for that because no one else want to moderate the subs since it requires time investment.

Moderation is always and a thorn on their site for many forum/discussion sites. When Elon Musk announced their consideration creating a new social media platform, I always think of how they will manage the moderation part in those platforms? Look at other small social media platform like Truth, Gab, Parler. Common issue with those sites is moderation.

[torginus]

Yea, and most forums would eventually attract a bunch of die-hard but absolutely insufferable users with all the time in the world. Occasionally these folks would be in cahoots with the admin staff and would get to have their transgressions ignored while banning people who dared to disagree with them.

I've seen a handful of these people wreak havoc on huge online communities.

[Isthatablackgsd]

You are not wrong. I was in a game modding & hacking forum and there was a discussion about particular game. There was heated debate between the original poster and the moderator in a thread and then this moderator decided to target and respond hateful political comment against the original poster that are not relevant to the gaming mod topic. It is like the mod had their ego bruised and felt like need to take it out on the original poster. I reported that mod to the admin/owner of the forum and the response I got from them is that everything is fine and it is not against their TOS (while it is...). Which is sad because this mod is well known in this community, it is out of character for this mod to react that way. After that response from admin, I lost all respect for that admin and the mod.