This can be true in a lot of areas, but honestly the LGBTQ subreddits (and to an extent tumblr) are far better than most community discussion sites. I’ve made a

This can be true in a lot of areas, but honestly the LGBTQ subreddits (and to an extent tumblr) are far better than most community discussion sites. I’ve made a ton of real-world friendships that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. In some marginalized communities, there is a tendency for the most marginalized people to impose their needs upon the entire group, which drives away many others. As a result, many physical LGBTQ resource centers and online forums are the fiefdoms of a few people who are easily “triggered” and create strange rules to manipulate people. These places tend to be especially unwelcoming and intimidating to people who recently discovered their identity. Reddit’s mod system (and the fact if the mods go nuts you can easily create a new sub) actually helps protect against some of this by allowing subs to avoid excessive moderation of “marginal” content (usually discussion that brings up legitimate issues that may upset some members of the group). It’s easy for users to join anonymously, so no fear of your family finding out that you’re trying to figure out your same-sex attraction. Users also tend to gravitate toward the subreddits with the most permissible rules, then filter out into smaller, more specialized subreddits as their interests grow. To look at a subreddit as consisting of the subreddit itself is limited; you also have to look at the other subreddits it’s users post in to get a real feel for the “community”. Reddit allows these Venn diagram relationships between spaces and communities in a similar way to how they occur in real life. Also, Reddit has a big advantage for marginalized communities in that the site admins are relatively responsive to (and has provided moderator tools for dealing with) harassment, and Reddit is large enough it won’t wilt under a sustained DDOS like many independent LGBTQ forums periodically do. The forums I’m talking about are really more “community support” for people dealing with tough personal problems (both through actual conversation and shitposting of memes). Because it’s very easy for users to enter and leave communities, Reddit is fantastic for a community that by its nature is a bit of a “revolving door” (as many LGBTQ subs are). All that said, the idea of independent “forums” is all but dead at this point. Existing ones will continue to exist, but new ones don’t exactly pop up anymore. The use case has largely migrated to Discord, which is even more difficult to discover because it’s not searchable with Google.