The difference between forum and a subreddit or discord isn't ultimately the features, it's localism. A forum can make it's own rules whereas Reddit ultimately makes the rules for a subreddit.
The difference between forum and a subreddit or discord isn't ultimately the features, it's localism. A forum can make it's own rules whereas Reddit ultimately makes the rules for a subreddit.
Were most forums pushing the outer boundaries of acceptable speech online? Reddit mods make and enforce the rules. Reddit gets involved mainly when subreddits do borderline illegal stuff. Is this a real problem, or a hypothetical one?
That's a bit like asking "what did most books do?"
The whole point of forums was that it's difficult to make a generalization about them and moreover, what "most" forums did/do doesn't matter. What a particular forum might do in a particular context is what mattered.
The beginning of the end for Reddit was when they started changing the rules specifically to target certain subreddits.
When the mods and users dutifully complied with new rules, the admins got frustrated and began curating r/all and r/popular to prevent posts from those subs from appearing.
When that didn’t work, Reddit would then quarantine or ban subreddits based on obvious and organized spam of against-TOS material and subsequent mass reporting of that material by the same individuals.
Once those purges were done they started the enshittification that continues in high-gear to this day.