Let's expand my piracy theory a bit.
to have an active discussion community on the internet, you need to have a sufficient number of people, that have similar interests, are willing to talk to each other, and on the internet.
I would say its very hard to meet those requirements if you set out to meet them. You need a certain number of people for a community to be active, and its hard to get people to join an empty community. So its a loop that results in no active community. Thus there needs to be something that breaks to loop and gets enough people for an active community.
Piracy hubs are one way to get enough people in one place, with similar interests, interested in discussion, and on the internet. Anime is the only one that truly requires large hubs for piracy like Asuki was, but I find that a lot of my conversations about movies happen on private tracker forums. Where do non-pirating movie fans have their discussions?
For gaming, maybe the thing that got enough people together was mmo's. The dev's website where one downloaded the mmo/read update news/etc would meet the requirements to start an active community, thus forum, thus community.
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This is likely, but why hasn't sci-fi succeeded in a similiar way? Pre internet, the science fiction fandom was the largest and most organized fandom in the world, operating hundreds of amateur zines. Anime fandom in itself is a spinoff of it. With the internet, most of those zines have dissappeared (for obvious reasons), but no large centralized online equivalent have ever arisen to take their place. This is a strange thing.
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Nothing forced the sci fi fandom onto the internet. It met the first three requirements, but never the last one of "on the internet." Sci fi fans were happy talking to other sci fi fans in real life and reading physical zines that they never saw the internet as worth it. Anime fans on the other hand saw the internet as very worth it since fansubs as video files were a huge improvement over fansubs as VHS's, online fansub distribution hubs brought a lot of people with similar interests together who were willing to discuss things onto the internet, thus online presence.