I used to search around for various forums to post in or find answers in. Over the years, the little forums vanished and all that’s left is Reddit and a few holdouts. The only real advantage of the Reddit model is that you don’t have to read 5 pages of flame war and off topic “how is your cat these days?” to find a good comment. If the average web forum sorted posts by upvotes instead of chronologically by default (while letting a user choose their preference), I think small forums would still be a lot more common - Eg, hn, stack overflow, etc