As someone who helped run a few video game forums back in the mid-00’s, it was pretty common for a pure forum to start posting blog or article content if it didn’t already as a way of attracting people to the forum. Once this happened you needed to share that content to sites like digg, del.icio.us & Reddit in order for people to actually discover it and then consider joining the forum community.

Problem is it eventually just pushed people to consume from those sites and join the meta-community there rather than actually engaging in the community back at the site itself.

After that, the standard conglomeration you get when there’s only a few players left happened and thus we ended up with Reddit being what it was for the last decade.

Most of those sites were community first, content generation second and once the community dried up, the sites all died