citation needed, I've seen many reddit threads degenerate into name-calling, logical fallacies, political posturing, and what have you. If they don't, my guess is it's a very focused subreddit that doesn't attract much general interest, or the mods are very on top of things.
But 95%% of attention will go to the "top" branches which are usually memes and "dumbass marathons" were people are trying to keep the original joke going.
Compared to how most of the attention in a traditional forum will go to people trying to respond to the TC/OP? Even in cases where 4-5 pages in the TC already resolved the issue?
The only benefit for a forum is that it "bumps" a topic when you participate in it, so you can keep a topic alive. But that isn't too difficult for a threaded style forum to replicate. That just wasn't how Reddit wanted topics to work (nor HN, in our case). Reddit never even implemented a way to subscribe to a topic despite a 3rd party extension having a feature for over a decade.
When you have to collapse a dozen worthless discussion trees to find one that is actually discussing the topic instead of spamming lame reddit narwhal memes, I think it's fair to call the discussion derailed.
Point is, linear boards like phpBB can't even support threads this large - without the tree, a thread goes to shit the moment someone posts a lame meme.
citation needed, I've seen many reddit threads degenerate into name-calling, logical fallacies, political posturing, and what have you. If they don't, my guess is it's a very focused subreddit that doesn't attract much general interest, or the mods are very on top of things.