Comment by exergy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exergy | Hacker News Reader

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Yep.

Much as I rail against the overly pedantic nature of many, many comments here, this place is a veritable treasure trove compared to Reddit.

On Reddit, every single fucking thread gets derailed by shitty puns, basement-tier humour or a one-liner with all the nuance of a tweet. Doesn't matter how sombre a topic, some dickhead is going to make an oh-so-clever quip and legions of fellow dickheads will line up to suck his dick and upvote it to the top.

Even when there are substantive comments, the replies to those comments rarely make for useful reading.

"Take my upvote and fuck off"

"Nice"

"Mom's spaghetti"

"/r/Suicidebywords" on a comment about dick sizes

... and on and on

Not to mention the fact that Reddit's recent algorithms upvote the shittiest content to the front page to begin with. I mean, /r/dankmemes? /r/memeeconomy? /r/wholesome memes? Fuck outta here with that shit.

There are exceptions, of course. /r/financialindependence comes to mind. But overall, it's become an out of control shitshow that I visit ever less frequently.

So yeah, thank god for HN.

reddit is what you make of it. That's the whole point of different subreddits and the ability to customize what you see.

Once you get rid of the default subscriptions, the experience becomes way more enjoyable. Smaller subreddits generate less garbage and tend to be moderated better. Even better, you're less likely to see ads-disguised-as-content like you do on /r/pics and /r/aww. No one posts in /r/woodworking or /r/PrintSF because they want to whore some karma. /r/asoiaf has some wonderfully nuanced (if not repetitive due to the lack of new source material) discussions. And so on.

Overall, though, I think the state of /r/AskReddit gives the best summary of reddit's downfall. When I started going on reddit in 2009, the threads there were often interesting, and you didn't have to tag something "serious" to get serious replies. Several years ago, it began to be the case that if you didn't tag something serious, then, well, you would get thousands of comments of _literally_ the same joke. And that's default reddit -- thousands of comments of literally the same joke.

Reddit is way more enjoyable than HN. On reddit you can have serious discussions and you can have fun. HN is trying too hard to be serious. It may be interesting, but rarely it is fun.

Couldn't disagree more. If I want fun, I'd watch some comedian on YouTube, way higher quality. If I wanted serious discussion, Reddit has too much noise for the signal that it does offer.

The Reddit of today is about posting the "funniest" screenshots from Twitter, things like blackpeopletwitter, whitepeopletwitter, murderedbywords and so on.

>The Reddit of today is about posting the "funniest" screenshots from Twitter, things like blackpeopletwitter, whitepeopletwitter, murderedbywords and so on.

It's easy to say that Reddit has no discussions of merit when only using examples of subreddits which have no intent to have discussions of merit, and focus primarily on memes and light-hearted content. But it's purposely disingenuous to do so. That's usually what people seem to do.

But compare the quality of discussion between Hacker News and the programming subreddits from which stories are usually reposted, or the heavily moderated expert subs like /r/askahistorian, and see if HN really still stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of quality. In my experience, with the minor exception that HN is allergic to any sort of humor, the experience is about the same.

Yeah I know. People bring up r/science and the history subreddits all the time. And you're right, they do stick to the topic. The trouble is that they're both very siloed. If you don't like those topics all the time, you have to go elsewhere. Hence my comment on signal to noise.

Totally agree about the no humour thing on HN though.

Hacker News tries to be siloed, it's just that the silo is vaguely defined and subjective ("anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity.")

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