IMO, the value of Reddit was that it was a group of forums with SSO and decent discoverability.
If you wanted to find a forum on a specific topic on the broader web, you had to sift through various sites and look for individual hints as to their vitality, and then register and introduce yourself on each one. With Reddit it was a single search away, and the more or less consistent UI made it easy to tell "this is the active one."
But importantly, it retained a lot of the value a forum does: a comment pool that persists, that shows up in Google later.
Discord is a TERRIBLE substitute. It's not meaningfully threaded. It's not externally searchable. It doesn't even have the "it's federated, so we're not beholden to one specific owner who will inevitably tank it." catch.
If you wanted to find a forum on a specific topic on the broader web, you had to sift through various sites and look for individual hints as to their vitality, and then register and introduce yourself on each one. With Reddit it was a single search away, and the more or less consistent UI made it easy to tell "this is the active one."
But importantly, it retained a lot of the value a forum does: a comment pool that persists, that shows up in Google later.
Discord is a TERRIBLE substitute. It's not meaningfully threaded. It's not externally searchable. It doesn't even have the "it's federated, so we're not beholden to one specific owner who will inevitably tank it." catch.