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You did have the option of opening a competing forum if you had a modicum of tech knowledge, and this was extremely common. It was also independent from the adm

You did have the option of opening a competing forum if you had a modicum of tech knowledge, and this was extremely common. It was also independent from the administration of the offending forum, unlike Reddit, where administration biases are applied to 300+ million active users, and a small group of rule obsessed powerusers direct a significant amount of the big boards. Forum administration was terrible, but there was a far healthier ecosystem full of alternatives that no longer exists. Remember, SomethingAwful's overmoderation was what popularized imageboards for westerners, and Digg's failings were what popularized Reddit. There is no equivalent today.

bink 3y ago
You could open a competing forum, but users of the previous forum would not automatically have access to it, which was my point. You'd have to somehow reach out to them to let them know it existed and they'd have to create new accounts and all that. That would be hard to do if you no longer had access to the old forum. With reddit you can simply open a new sub and everyone would already have access with their existing accounts.