Comment by derbOac

> I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features.

There's a lot of differences and they show up all the time with subreddits trying to poorly emulate the full featured organizational flexibility of a traditional forum.

The short answer is there's no subsubreddits, or subsubsubreddits, which are normal in forums, and turn out to be useful or even necessary.

What happens in the subs are classes of content posted repeatedly, members of the subs complaining about this repetitiveness, asking to have it removed, and so forth. The mods are torn because the posts are clearly popular but they do swamp the sub, and so you end up with "daily threads" about x or y. But this doesn't quite work because they're hard to search and aren't what you really need, which are subforums and subsubforums.

See e.g., r/running which was decimated by an attempt to reorganize it with the severe limitations of Reddit. If it was a forum, it would be really obvious how to organize it.

Reddit is pointing in the right direction in emulating traditional forums but doesn't have the same depth.

This doesn't even get into what I see as the harms of downvoting — sometimes I think it works better to just allow emoji reactions to posts, instead of upvoting and downvoting points (although maybe it's not upvoting and downvoting that's the problem, it's the way it's implemented?)

Personally I don't think what's needed really exists yet, or hasn't taken off: a decentralized version of Reddit that allows for more subnesting. Mastodon has features of this too but not really the nesting part at all.