The interface and the approach by the site owner makes a difference.

I hated looking at threads on Microsoft or Intel's forums. Many replies to postings were clearly level 1 outsourced agents in India or some other faraway place reading from a script. It was plainly obvious because many times their response would not have much to do at all with what the OP was asking after, and all it did was just aggravate people because they felt they were not being heard. Lots of noise, no signal.

On reddit, one doesn't have this infestation of script-reading call-centre agents and can often find the information you need. Of course, reddit is not perfect either. Rules are arbitrarily interpreted by many mods, and there is no avenue for review or appeal to a higher authority.

That said, I do like classic web forums. They're great, everything is subject-specific. But one downside to them is that you have to travel to them to view them as opposed to being on an aggregator like reddit where people are already there and might have subscribed to a sub.

A lot of companies use Facebook for their customer interactions because they don't need to do much.. the business page template is pre-defined.

I use RSS feeds for some forums. For example, phpBB-based forums provide such feeds for new messages in a thread or new threads in a forum. The downside is that you could not reply using your feedreader. But then again, I'm more of a lurker than a partaker, so that's not much of a problem for me.

I think you're being unfair to Reddit and others like it (thinking specifically of Discord). I run a product that has extensive community interaction, and Discord has been a life saver. There is no way we could have convinced people to sign up for a random forum, but they're happy to use Discord, which makes joining via invite link trivial. It also works better for synchronous communication. If someone reports an issue, I can immediately DM them and have them DM me back some info. It just works SO much better than a forum.

Have you tried any alternatives to a forum? I see similar sentiment to your post a lot on HN, and the impression I always get is that people haven't given alternatives an honest chance. There is a reason the forum is dying. The alternatives are simply better.

To directly answer your question: I did, and i'm not saying they're necessarily a bad idea, still better than nothing. It's just that obviously there's a trade being made.

And i did not necessarily say full-fledged forums.Something like what spotify has, disqus, mastodon,etc. There are a lot of options, and i understand the "i don't want to make an account for that issue" argument, i truly do, but on the other hand i think if the issue is so important maybe another step doesn't hurt. Also naming clashing, spam/bots, eventually censorship issues are arguably way harder to appear.

Again, i think this is better for actual product/services where we're talking about official support channels, and not something that you rely on the community: free software: editors, games, etc.

If I have a question about VS Code, or Ubuntu, I can just pop on the respective subreddit and quickly ask it.

No way I'm going to create a forum account, confirm the email, save the password, just for a on off.

Indeed, i was talking more about official product/services and not software where the community is largely the one offering answers to new users.

The reason to avoid running your own forum is because the cost of effort to interact on a bespoke forum is lower than it is on a dedicated one. Subreddits usually ban people from posting who have under a specific amount of points; this stopped the illiterate from posting for a very long time, up until the parent company started pushing the mobile app and punishing subreddits that do. If you compare the discussion quality on a subreddit that still enforces quality posters with, say, Apple's bespoke forum, you'll quickly see why the platform is useful.

Indeed, I've asked for help on a reddit, because the install instructions said "get stuck? ask on our reddit!" Got zero help, just one person saying "there's no bugs in that build, just follow the instructions" and that was the end of it. sigh. It could have happened anywhere, but redditors seem to relish in having a bad attitude.