Hosting costs are the easy one to point to. Liability also gets there. If you host your own forums and fail to moderate it, you can be sure that illegal conte

Hosting costs are the easy one to point to. Liability also gets there. If you host your own forums and fail to moderate it, you can be sure that illegal content will show up there. On reddit, if the mods fail to moderate illegal content Reddit will step in and shut it down - but a mod going on vacation for a week or two won't cause problems that failing to moderate/hosting such content on a forum would. Reddit makes discovery much easier. Say if you like cat pictures and go to /r/cats - and then someone says "oh, what a nice black cat! But I can only see the eyes, post this in /r/eyesofthevoid too." Webrings (there's a term you haven't heard in a while) partly solve that problem, but in the context of forums only make reading easier. Each forum you'd have to sign up for again. Let's talk about security too. The locally hosted forums had regular security problems. We were trusting whoever was hosting the forum to regularly keep phpForums up to date. There's certainly an option to go host a forum. If you have a community that wants to move from Reddit to something else, go for it - be it a reddit clone or a forum. The thing to be aware of is that it is a lot more work to pay for, host, and manage than clicking "create community" on Reddit.