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Comment by MattRix | Hacker News Reader

It’s a bit silly considering that this site is pretty much the same as any Reddit subreddit.

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.

There is one feature I've identified on HN that I think Reddit could really benefit from. Disallowing downvotes on direct replies prevents users from training themselves to downvote in the least productive manner possible - the spiteful "How dare you disagree with me" downvote.

The karma loss limit of six per comment is also helpful - on reddit you may be hesitant to break with generally expressed opinions over how drastically it can drain your comment - here the two options are -6 or banned (if you're really spewing hate speech).

Also, a shout out to dang for remaining very good at not interfering except when it's really warranted and then shutting things down quick.

Generally speaking, the smaller the subreddit the better the community. I really like the subreddit dedicated to my favorite baseball team. I like the /r/MLB subreddit too, but less so. The noise noise from everyone posting and trying to make the frontpage leads to an inevitable degradation in quality.

I remember a while back when /r/cfb was invited to join the front page and there was considerable pushback from members who were afraid the reddit-wide readership would ruin the quality of posts. Kind of an eternal september thing...

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.

> 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.

You can tell yourself that, but it just isn’t true. It really depends entirely on the subreddit itself. There are plenty of Reddit subreddits with high quality content, discussion, etc.

You can have that thought - but it's incorrect.

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.

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