It's slightly funny to read about a "moderated, distributed, and anonymous" forum system, as if these features were new and exciting, when we've basically had exactly that since about 1980: usenet.
So, the obvious question is this: why aren't we seeing a massive influx of Usenet users from Reddit right now? And why didn't everyone move to Usenet rather than Reddit after Digg fell apart?
There's clearly something, or somethings, that are preventing Usenet from being terribly useful at present for the "Reddit-like" use case.
(I used to be a heavy Usenet user back in the '90s. Haven't touched it in more than a decade, though.)
It's been a good while, perhaps a decade now, since usenet was really a commonplace thing, so it's unlikely that anyone will ever flock there now.
Usenet's downfall perhaps in part stems from its legacy as part of the "nice" era of computing's history, when it was just sort of assumed that everyone using computers were friendly people in academia and thus we didn't need to worry about bad people doing bad things. Some people would date Usenet's downward spiral as starting with Eternal September, but I think really it was just spam and binaries that killed it (the latter making usenet very expensive - and risky - for ISPs to offer as a service; which meant then looking for a (probably) paid-for alternative news provider).
Once people stopped using it, it became hard to see why it was good in the first place - and everybody by that point was doing everything through their web browser, and there never really was a great usenet experience through the web (certainly Google Groups wasn't it).
