There are plenty of really shallow forums, and plenty of really close-knit and/or tolerant sub-reddits with good moderators. It's just that the big ones are the easiest to find, and tends to quickly become impossible to moderate in anything but very impersonal ways.

> I also dislike reddit because it's hard to remember a name constantly

There are tons of extensions/apps for Reddit that lets you annotate/tag users and the like. I do tend to agree with that to some extent, though - a more personal touch would make it easier to have conversations feel like they're with people rather than with handles.