I think Reddit getting big also killed a lot of the old forums. The frictionlessness of joining a community made it hard to compete. And the general lack of per

I think Reddit getting big also killed a lot of the old forums. The frictionlessness of joining a community made it hard to compete. And the general lack of personality to user profiles in Reddit avoided the "cool kid's clique" issue that happens with a lot of forums where everyone knows each other. I remember in the "dying days" of some of the forums I was on the conversation had largely devolved into reposting and discussing memes and things that were happening on Reddit. From there it's just a matter of time before the discussion moved to Reddit too. This fate perhaps could have been avoided if "Sign in with Google" type capabilities were more widely available at the time, or if we had a more universal login/forum scheme like Disqus back then, but they all came around too late.