While I miss forum days as well, reddit has permanently shifted the space. For someone with a lot of interests, are you going to sign up for a forum for each one and keep tabs on those? It's difficult to even think about how I want my online "community" to look without reddit, even though I'm glad to be leaving.

This is what I want to happen although I know it never will. Communities used to be spread out across the internet on individual sites that were maintained by enthusiasts as a hobby. I found the interactions among such communities to bar far more enjoyable. Once any community reaches a threshold of users it starts to get unpleasant.

I think the other thing that made forums a better place was the absence of a upvote/downvote system. It reduced the motivation of just chasing attention with little jokes and threads could stay on the front page so long as there was active conversation going on.

Forums were also dedicated to "mostly related" things (like a subreddit) and it was a bit of effort to create a new account on a different forum, and you were obviously new at that point.

So "brigading" and such weren't really much of an issue (and the issue has always been people barging into a community, knowing nothing about it, pontificating on some post/issue, and promptly leaving).

Forums still exist, but you need a slightly strange sort of person to continue to put the effort into them when Reddit is "free and easy".

There are lots of solutions to needing to create an account now. There's social logins, and the prevalence of password managers if you want to use an email and can't remember if you already have a login.

Reddit is easier because you already have an account, but creating an account on a random site has never been easier to do or manage, so it's not that much harder (and importantly, people already do it because not everything is on reddit so it's not "new" to learn how to create an account somewhere).

I wonder if online discussions will shift to Discord channels. Sure it’s another centralised “forum” but it does seem like a credible alternative - a lot of discussion already seem to happens there.

Much already has, and it's very sad, as Discord creates an entirely different "feel" for a community, and is not visible to the Internet at large.

The voting system is gamification of forum posting. Instead of posting when you feel you have something to say, people end up chasing a number for the dopamine hit.

There's nothing terrible about downvotes as such if they are done right, but this is one thing Slashdot did right: you can never be more than +5 or -1 on any post.