I lurk in a few subreddits that have well established forums outside of Reddit (decades old with tens of thousands of users) that are the top Google results and I'm always a bit amazed that people will still post on Reddit instead of using those other forums where they will get much, much better answers.
Your own comment doesn’t include any specific examples of these communities, which I think reflects the big problem: discovery. As big as HN is, I rarely see it mentioned anywhere that’s not HN-adjacent. I’d love to hear about some of these other communities, but I do suspect they’ll each have varying features, cultural norms, and suboptimal onboarding guides for newbies. Especially if they’re decades old.
I think if you’re “in-the-know” and have grown with some of these high quality forums/communities for years, you’ll lose touch with understanding what new users need to join as the quality and depth of discussion become higher and deeper.
Sure, I mostly understand. I meant amazed more like the context of the OP of Reddit draining people away from other forums. Amazed that all it takes is saving them 15 seconds of creating a new account, often on a forum that has better features than Reddit, for them to prefer Reddit. It doesn't take much for people to opt in to a centralized internet.
The forum software itself may be unfamiliar. Does it have better features than Reddit? Some do; others don't. Does the forum have really bizarre rules or conventions? Subreddits can too, but it seems to be less common. Will my first ten posts get held for moderation? They probably won't on my 17 year old Reddit account.
It would be nice to see a federated identity/reputation system take off though. I'm thinking of OpenID plus [some other technology that probably exists, but isn't popular] where any of many service providers or my own website can confirm my identity, then offer vouches from other forums along the lines of "Zak has been a member of [community] for 2 years, posted 473 times, and has not been banned as of [date]".
