Reddit is very far from a forum. It's centrally administered by people outside your community who have a profit motive, it serves ads, has a terrible free speech record, and a slight amount of popularity means people will wander into your community and, generally, fill it with low content garbage. Reddit is a horrible place to host a community, and, in my eyes, is the actual cause of the death of forums more so than Facebook.

> It's centrally administered by people outside your community who have a profit motive

The only thing that the administrators outside your community do is the shitty redesigns of the UI (big thanks to them for the "old.reddit.com" option though).

Everything else is done by the community of a subreddit.

Reddit admins shut down communities without warning due to their own political whims, have edited the content of a users post with no indication of doing so, and, as said already, inject ads. Reddit's model is paternalistic at best.

I would say that political whims have nothing to do with shutting down subs like fatpeoplehate, jailbait and incels. Places that routinely advocate, or have been directly tied to violence tend to get shut down. See the pizzagate debacle. Same with all the qanon stuff.

Interesting, /r/the_donald, which has, and continues to this day, explicitly called for perpetrating violence on minorities, people with opposing political views, democratic politicians, etc. etc ad nauseum, remains up and running to this day.

It is far and away worse than fph and incels in terms of content, but for some mystical reason that's totally not /u/spez vetoing any attempt to reign it in due to his conservative ideology, it has missed the banhammer.

Complete political whims.

Do you have any recommendations for a better general-discussion site?

Personally, I have found myself resorting to discussion sites focused on a single topic, like Hacker News instead of /r/programming, or DharmaWheel.net instead of /r/Buddhism.

I don't, unfortunately. I'm in the same boat as you. I frequent a few narrowly focused sites, and spend some time in a couple IRC channels for more general discussion, but that's not quite the same. I wish I had a good recommendation, and would love to hear one from others.

Reddit uses machine learning models to maximize engagement. This ruins any of the forum-like qualities reddit had. It’s gross.

Every subreddit is constantly in the process of eternal September, which kills the dynamics of getting to know one another that were common on forums.

Social media that is good cannot have advertising and cannot be an algorithmic Skinner box that maximizes engagement.

I am starting to think of competing with Facebook as creating online tribes that are costly, perhaps even financially very costly, but full of rich directed action. Sometimes like the dynamics of a church, where users are collated into tribes of limited size.

> Reddit uses machine learning models to maximize engagement.

Can't you just sort by new...?

You need to get everyone to sort by new.

The mechanics of Reddit are completely different from forums. Many niche subreddits have seen an entire change in culture and content quality simply because a single posts hit the front page, bringing with it a flood of new subscribers who simply post variations of that top-ranking post in order to gain upvotes, or "Reddit gold", a useless e-token that is somehow considered extremely valuable to some Redditors.

> The mechanics of Reddit are completely different from forums

Well, that's the double-edged sword of reddit: it helps niche forums stay alive by constantly bringing in new users that originally visited reddit for other reasons. But that visibility can also kill them.

Still, aren't there lots of private subreddits or subreddits where only subscribers can post? If mods are active and ban regularly, you can preserve a culture if you want.

Reddit also has its issues though. Recently they have increased policing of the subs and removed many in guise of breaching rules. Not to mention their terrible UX for the "new reddit" which has prompted me to change all my bookmarks to "old.reddit.com/r/<sub>".

I also wanted to point this out, but I guess Reddit does pose a risk that they make some system-wide decision and in the process all those subreddits either vanish or die a slow death.

As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...

> As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...

This can be read as a searing indictment of reddit: it's quirky and interesting, but its value ends there. There's no real discussion to be had and most topic-specific subs are wildly uninformed for most of the things I have any personal experience with. This is certainly not limited to the tiny slice of the world I know well.

So, getting back to OP's message. Do you think that there are currently forums like Reddit but with more substance?

Let's take some of the DIY forums. Reddit can get pretty useful, but how does this relate to 1999? Back then, getting DIY videos was difficult. Now the trick is getting to the right kind of quality videos. But perhaps in 1999 if you read something and engaged online the experience was maybe more personal/fulfilling/substancial?