You might be right about the voting system, but reddit- (and HN-) style threading is so much better for following discussions as they naturally branch into different things. Trying to follow a certain "thread" of discussion in a traditional linear forum thread can be next to impossible when you have 10s of pages to flip through looking for any replies addressed to a comment on page 4.

Yep. Discussion boards should have a flagging mechanism for user-driven-moderation to help remove hateful/inappropriate/offensive content but that's it.

I much prefer the multithreaded UI, but agree that the up/down vote systems aren't great. If it were simply sorted by time, I'd be happy.