Hacker News Reader

I just had a look and the submissions were very similar to the front page on HN. Are you exaggerating or do you think the quality has gone down here as well?

I think that actually, most of the submissions there come from the front page of HN.

The submissions are nearly identical on any given day. The discussions? Not so much.

Not saying HN comment threads are the pinnacle of discourse, but they are an order of magnitude better than proggit's.

Before Hacker News was popular, you tended to be able to go to proggit for breaking news and large discussions. Being less popular, HN had smaller discussions and stories took longer to rotate out. There was much more focus on startups and California things, much less on infosec.

Proggit now seems to have been reduced to an HN mirror, but HN is something else too.

I used to read r/programming a lot, but eventually ended up reading hacker news for this kind of news. I would not be surprised if you could match r/programming decline in popularity with a rise in popularity of HN.

This is probably related to SO and the later rise of HN in that area as well.

It does seem to be the blind leading the blind much more than in other forums.