Anyway, the forums of the aughts were discoverable through search and anecdotally used to be more highly ranked in search queries until they mysteriously started getting derailed by Google I think around 2016 or so. They solve the moderation and spam problem by have forum moderators just like Reddit - unlike Reddit these were usually real people from the forum + owners, and not powermods. Power mods I think do all kinds of shady stuff to monetize their control, with forums that’s less necessary as you can just put up banner ads, sponsored content, etc without running afoul to Reddit policies. And unlike with Reddit, there is no huge incumbency/landgrab advantage from controlling a common term like “politics” because you’re not running on a single site. I was surprised not to see it mentioned more here or on the current top Reddit post also discussing this, I guess most Reddit users are too young to have had exposure to them, but besides Digg it’s actually what Reddit replaced as it grew in the early 2010s.
Anymore you have to verify each response, look into their history, etc. Which puts it back on par with Amazon reviews, really.
Putting site:reddit.com in the search removes a ton of garbage from the results. While companies might still game Reddit, they absolutely flood Google with fake pages and Google seems to do nothing to filter them out. Most of those pages don't even try very hard and are obviously fake... There's just so many of them that looking past them is painful.
I think it'd basically mean there was an easy way to access usenet text groups via the browser, and thus also an easy way for the average Joe to access usenet.
Some have already mentioned spam and moderation, and I think this will be a huge factor. Without the ability to moderate, bad actors quickly ruin any potentially-popular social media outlet. Most comments are happy about the lack of moderation so far, but that's actually a problem IMO.