[bitshiftfaced]

Reddit and Discord have two major advantages over traditional forums. It's less friction when you don't have to sign up. If you already have an account, you need only subscribe to the channel/subreddit of your interest. You more easily accumulate contributors, and then you have more content, and then that in turn makes your platform more relevant.

The second reason is that Reddit/Discord is its own source of advertising. You don't start off with a great forum. You have to get people to use it. Probably most forums never get past the ghost town stage before people see it as something worth signing up for.

[wyclif]

I'm in a few Discord communities, but I don't enjoy using Discord. Even though I'm only on a few servers it feels like a firehose every time I open it. I get information fatigue. Reddit is similar but to a lesser extent. Plus I get so tired of the captcha-"You're not finished yet"-/verify flow. If you sign up to several servers at once it's not really a good user experience.