Message boards and niche sites worked really well for me in the early 2000. What made them useful though was that astroturfing was non existing at the time.

There was a very famous case in my country of a preppy kid who took the whole rap world by storm getting stupid numbers in a niche site, and only after he had gotten big contracts with multinational labels it came out that he had just set a bot to download the music and inflate numbers, that’s how trust based the system was.