tl;dr: The author reminisces about early web forums (WWWBoard, phpBB, vBulletin, UBB) and their quirky tech like BBCode, arguing they fostered better communities than modern algorithm-driven social media. Forums lost out to Web 2.0 platforms like Reddit and Digg largely due to novelty-seeking and the burden of self-hosting, not because they were worse. The piece suggests users may eventually return to smaller, forum-style communities as they tire of scale-driven engagement and "context collapse."