It's not the site, it's how people use it.

If you think this aggregated platform is worse than an oldschool forum where you have to do all the debugging, patching and spam and bot hunting yourself, where you kiss up to the burned-out admin and his lazy selfish group of mod bros, you're self-deluding or misinformed.

How people use it though, is different. And this has nothing to do with Reddit itself because it has mostly the same functionalities as any old board. But these days if you want to get closer to others, you create a Discord. You use Reddit through the "feed", you post a quick opinion and then move on to the next topic. So that culture of discussion and connecting with regulars, while it still happens, especially on smaller subs, is less prevalent. I don't even comment if a topic has over like 50 comments because I know it's gonna get ignored and buried, people have already moved on, it's a waste of time.

Note that on an old PHP board, the last commented topic usually gets pushed to the top. This leads to the opposite effect where say out of 10 new topic 9 gets buried with barely any comments and 1 emerges as a popular discussion that may go on and on.