I miss bbses. I resisted the internet switch for as long as possible. I remember the last c64 release..wasn't it monsters of mayham.. the graphics were amazing and the gameplay fast. Sort of like a mario world.
BBS could be elite where you needed references. It could be local family focuses with no swearing. There was a network of bbses who would share posts.. that was cool.
The best thing about bbses. As a SysOp I could start chatting with any user. The person logging in actual used your computer so in real time you could watch what the user was doing. Websites lost that.
We lost the “local” based internet groups and we only really have “subject” based groupings anymore.
Spammers killed many a forum because it became a full time effort by admins and moderators to remove them. Automated tools, especially early tools, had limited effectiveness. People running a site as a hobby don't want to spend their days removing spam comments.
Assholes also (for many reasons) will DDoS forums. This is another administrative headache for site owners if not a financial headache.
The same driving force saw blogs remove comments for centralized solutions like discus or abandon self-hosted blogs for Medium and the like.
While Facebook and reddit have plenty of spam issues the "owners" and mods of a group/subreddit are different from the site admins. There's a lot less financial risk for someone running a group there than their own server. They also let a wider swath of people run a group rather than only those that are interested in a niche topic, have the technical skills to effectively run a forums, and the money to pay for it all.