Also, if you find The Next Reddit, let me know so I can build a new AskOuija there. :P
Particularly when other topic-focused communities already exist i.e. what problem are subreddits solving?
And to invert that to the whole set, what problem is Reddit solving? I think they've asked themselves that and the response is this new UX which has the non-answer 'don't know, but let's keep eyeballs on our site and away from Facebook'.
Subreddits don’t necessarily solve a problem... they’re just a well-made framework for content sharing and conversation, combining ideas from previous message board systems to provide a good user experience. But it’s the way Reddit combines them that makes them useful, which means I can’t answer this question without answering the following one:
> And to invert that to the whole set, what problem is Reddit solving?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but the answer seems blatantly obvious to me: it allows you to have all of your communities on a single platform. It creates a kind of meta-community... a user you interact with in one subreddit may show up later in another. Why would you create multiple independent accounts at multiple message boards across the web when you can have one account and one simple feed of relevant posts from all of your communities?
> I recoil at the suggestion of signing-up and slogging through curating and filtering until I achieve Reddit Nirvana. Life is too short.
I’m honestly perplexed as to why you think setting up a Reddit account is this gargantuan task. You find a few communities based on your interests and you subscribe to them. That’s it. And you don’t have to do it all at once. You can join as many or as few subreddits as you like, whenever you feel like it.
I must be missing something here. What topic-focused communities do you prefer? Are you talking about Facebook Groups?
Seems every thread about something built in javascript is full of people bashing it.
I don't think parent will find any high traffic developer discussion forum where people don't discuss JavaScript.
I admit I don't like the language, but there's definitely both camps on this site, seemingly in similar proportions.
But Xenforo is a really polished CMS with some good skins beside the god-awful default one. It's no vBulletin.
A couple examples of good ones:
/r/homelab /r/homeserver /r/selfhosted