The structure, participants, and audience are a lot different here than 99% of subreddits. There are a few well-managed subs there, but once they reach anywhere remotely near the size of HN, they turn into either navel-gazing echo chambers, or incredibly heavy-handed moderated subs where most of the users who would contribute meaningful content get banned or shadowbanned.

HN doesn't try to be everything to everyone like Reddit tries, and the moderation methods employed here are a lot less heavy-handed and take a few offenses before someone gets a meaningful ban or silencing.

At a technical level, I'd more or less agree with you. But from a content and community perspective, I disagree that it's pretty much the same.

IMHO, the signal-to-noise here is amazing; not perfect, but _so_ much better. If I really want memes or jokes, I'll go back to reddit (and I occasionally do if I want some mindless downtime). I get a lot more insightful information and community interaction here than there.

> any Reddit subreddit

I think you many 'any given Reddit subreddit', which is very true.

To others comments below: the signal to noise ratio here on HN is pretty good, and the average S/N on Reddit is pretty poor, but some subs over there are exceptional. For instance, https://old.reddit.com/r/askhistorians

HN is about as different as you can get from Reddit. For example, Reddit encourages herd behavior, minimal-effort glib interactions, and addictive content. HN discourages herd behavior, is quite difficult for most newcomers because the higher effort required, and even includes a built-in anti-procrastination feature.

Well it wasn't, but it's rapidly becoming more like Reddit, in a bad way. Most of Reddit's 50M active daily users are under the age of 18 as it's apparent by the front page, and the last few remaining older users are driven away day by day.

I've been using Reddit for 10 years now. I still mechanically go the comment section when I come across something interesting to find the link to the source. It's never there anymore. No intelligent discussions. No pointing out the obvious fakes and advertisements/astroturfing. People write long, idiotically fake posts just to get upvoted, to either farm karma or because they're children.

Unfortunately with HN getting slowly flooded as well, I don't know where else to turn for an online news aggregator/discussion platform that fits my demographic.