Looks like it's more of the initial establishing of a connection with the server the forum is hosted on and less the forum itself being slow, if I'm reading the dev tools timeline correctly. But yeah, it sure does feel a lot like loading a modern website through a dial up modem.
The thing is, once the connection is established, the loading is reasonably fast. It's just that getting to that point can take 20-30 seconds or more. Could it be that there's a cap on how many connections the server allows and bots are swamping it in order to crawl as many pages as possible in as short time as possible? Doesn't sound unreasonable to me but it's not like I'm a web dev.
Oh, and the Reddit thing, it's an echo chamber. Stuff that gets voted up gets attention. Stuff that gets voted down gets burried. It's also a place where the owner wants to monetize the user activity while doing very little himself to actually pay back users for their activity by providing a good forum experience. That job falls to volunteer moderators that the owner doesn't give a damn about. Pardon my French, but fuck that shithole sideways. In my opinion, anyway.
