They didn't suppress web forums, they instead went to prioritize SEO factors that of course SEO spammers maximized to abuse. Of course the Google solution was to prioritize reddit because people were searching for "<topic> reddit" due to said SEO spam.
I think the primary issue is that no matter what Google prioritizes for, the SEO "blogs" will always switch over to attempting to look like it. Forums, whose goal is just people talking to each other, are never going to end up at the top of the list compared to people actively attempting to game the algorithm. Even if Google started actively promoting things that look like forums, SEO people would just make things that look like forums but are hyper optimized for whatever Google was looking for.
The only way around this is for google to start making a white list of known good forums, but people get (understandably) really pissed when a company of google's size starts actively choosing winners and losers instead of just tuning their algorithm.
bing accounts for your history in promoting search results. and has a different algorithm to google, inevitable really because google's algorithm is secret and unknowable.
the problem is that google WANTs to promote forums because forums are reliable sources of truth, but with automation all they can do is look for subject authority markers (incoming link count, keywords, text references on other highly authoritative pages, etc)
SEO as an industry is about optimizing those markers to appear above "organic" results in a search page.
changing the markers only means the SEO industry will adjust to target the new priorities, but forum operators are always the last to optimize. it's a fundamentally unwinnable game
I posted this a few days ago, and in-line with your thoughts ;
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I use OLD+RES for MY consumption and data density - if you dont know how to configure these together to create a much faster, and more aesthetically pleasing (to me) UX - then that sucks.
