And I would argue that that is why Reddit sucks so much (personal opinion - I can understand why someone might enjoy the community there, but I do not in the slightest).

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the news aggregation feature, but the community aspects are terrible. The benefit of forums was primarily in their segregation of a small-but-active community. Reddit works in precisely the opposite manner, so you end up with boring, repetitive, least-common-denominator tripe. Any subreddit small enough to avoid that is too small to be worth the time - it seems that small communities (by which I mean actual communities, as opposed to random conglomerations of people with vaguely similar tastes) tend to have other sites and methods of communication they frequent, such as this one.

I think that the poor scaling of forums is their greatest strength, and Reddit is an example of what happens when forums do scale.