I would say Reddit, more so than any other of the potential replacements you mentioned, has taken on the role of hosting topic-based discussion which used to be the domain of forums.
It's part of the relentless push toward greater resource allocation efficiency. Just as it is orders of magnitude more efficient to distribute perishable goods through a centralized corporate supermarket chain rather than a patchwork of independent corner markets, Reddit reduces the total amount of operations overhead that once went in to maintaining thousands of independent vBulletin / phpBB / Discourse instances in the aggregate.
With all the recent talk about supply chain resilience and the inherent trade-offs necessary to improve it, one might wonder whether such considerations might be weighed differently going forward.
It's part of the relentless push toward greater resource allocation efficiency. Just as it is orders of magnitude more efficient to distribute perishable goods through a centralized corporate supermarket chain rather than a patchwork of independent corner markets, Reddit reduces the total amount of operations overhead that once went in to maintaining thousands of independent vBulletin / phpBB / Discourse instances in the aggregate.
With all the recent talk about supply chain resilience and the inherent trade-offs necessary to improve it, one might wonder whether such considerations might be weighed differently going forward.