Ask HN: Reddit vs. HN
Specifically /r/programming vs HN.
Is the user-base different? Is it just differences in karma/downvoting mechanics? Am I right to irrationally dislike reddit?
[Disclaimer: I am an avid HNer who has barely touched reddit]
Is the user-base different? Is it just differences in karma/downvoting mechanics? Am I right to irrationally dislike reddit?
[Disclaimer: I am an avid HNer who has barely touched reddit]
In honesty, reddit doesn't attract a lot of the actually-hacking hacker crowd.
I go to reddit to see what consumers think and HN to see what producers think.
Reddit is more like an unbridled 'id' of people in a similar culture to HN. Witchhunts, trolling, nastiness, low-effort posting, are stereotypes of reddits most famous and popular areas, and for good reason. Almost every community of any size on reddit is a pretty intellectually barren place (shout out to the outliers like /r/askscience).
It is what it is, but you go to reddit to talk about video games and popular culture and cat pictures, and you go to HN to talk about coding, web development, and the many topics surrounding it.
Sometimes I have the feeling that even HN is bit too redditish for me. Is there something that is to HN what HN is to reddit?
Mailing lists for the other stuff.
email me at mtelesha at not yahoo but the google email account with a title lobste.rs invite. I think I have 3 - 5 invites. Also include your HN user name. I have to verify your not a troll :)
UPDATE: I still have more invites 12:31 Eastern time
Treating reddit as a singular 'thing' like HN doesn't really work, reddit is a platform for thousands of communities each of which has different standards and expectations.
An online community focused on quality, thought-provoking conversations about a broad range of interests. It's a significantly different experience from other online communities:
-Most members choose to use their real identities on the site, and this information is only available to other members.
-Each member pays a small subscription fee, which helps keep out trolls and spammers. The fee also pays for moderators and serves as our members' commitment to quality and respect.
-Discoverboard doesn't display ads to subscribers or sell their data.
Full disclosure: I work for discoverboard. We would be very interested in hearing your thoughts about it. I've also created an invite code for free trials for people on this thread: https://discoverboard.com/code/HN
Where HN differs the most to me is the lack of jokes or comments that really aren't directly related to the post. On Reddit, jokes, in-references, and memes are often very highly upvoted. On HN, that seems to be frowned upon and downvoted quickly.
I think that this generally makes HN a much more pleasant, if slightly sterile place to hang out. In my opinion, that is a worthy trade off. I think the main critique I have of HN is that sometimes comments that are critical, but not necessarily mean get downvoted. Its a tough problem to solve though, so I can give it a pass. Maybe I should create a biometric mood ring that attaches your mood context with a post...
I honestly think a small part of all this is linked to the cultural differences between different generations and peoples.
Blast it, I've just undermined my own comment, I meant to say: Well, actually ...
On a serious note, both of them seem pretty similar to me.
More seriously, it probably depends on the tone you take. In all the times I've posted here, I've tried to be respectful and I've almost always received respect in turn, even when people didn't agree with me.
I also feel like the HN community is better an following the guidelines than Reddit. For example, I feel more HN'ers treat the downvote arrows as "does not add to discussion", while on Reddit the majority treat it as a "disagree" button. Maybe this is because you have to earn the ability to downvote on HN? Who knows, but I enjoy this community more for actually discussing things.
I'm fine with "well, actually..." if what follows is a well reasoned argument. On /r/math I've actually had someone reply that they were a millionaire, and thus I had to be wrong, followed by PM'ing me a photo of their bank statement.
The disheartening part, to me, was that certain individuals participating in /r/learnprogramming tended to be outright aggressive towards individuals who had legitimate questions -- questions I had myself when first learning to program.
While reddit seems to be the breeding ground for hate groups and public shaming, this is likely the minority (even if the minority seems rather large). I wouldn't expect to see posts on HN whose entire purpose is to generate hate speech against women speaking out against how women are currently portrayed in games or for the purpose of shaming an individual new to programming for their lack of "expert" knowledge.
HN
HN is wonderful in that you're more likely to learn something from the comments and have an intellectual discussion. If you can get to the discussion fast enough. Or if that thread doesn't magically die off. Due to the lack of a notification system on HN, there are lots of dangling, empty comments.
The problem is that HN is very much "all or nothing". If you post an HN question, you're either going to get 200+ comments with people discussing the minutiae or you get a 0 comment thread going.
Sharing links on HN is the same way. 90% of the userbase stays on the front page without even clicking "next" on the bottom that means that there are 20+ threads at any given moment but they usually stay static for hours at a time, giving no other threads any attention.
The upside is that self-promotion is totally okay. No one gives you shit for posting an article you wrote.
I don't personally spend too much time on /r/programming, but I do spend a ton of time on /r/webdev. The issue with Reddit is RULES. There are tons of rules, there are ruthless mods, and often, good content gets buried while terrible content makes it to the top. There's an inherent mistrust in the system.
With that said, I found it more likely to get an answer to a question on Reddit than on here. And I found it more likely that people would discuss something I post. Basically, Reddit feels like there is more small-user generated content rather than big journalism taking over. For example, check the top links for HN, how many of those come from big newspapers/online magazines that everyone knows? Now check Reddit, how about that ratio instead?
Basically, I feel like Reddit is more about users generating discussion and content while HN is more about users responding to a discussion or content. If that makes sense.
I use both, obviously.
HN = Down votes because someone disagrees and doesn't enter into a conversation. Culture of Start Up more than Hacker News. If you dare use M$ for Microsoft you get 4 down votes and your out of the conversation for being unprofessional and childish though M$ has been use in Hacker circles since the late 80s and points to the history of Microsoft doing what is best for money and not necessarily users (Hopefully this has changed) In Linux circles it is used often by professional coders all the time.
Reddit = Takes work to get just what you want. I usually during work on look at sub-reddits that are work related. This causes me to have a limited view of what is happening on Reddit on a whole but that is good in my opinion.
I don't like Reddit's common core audience and anything with a female or mom goes into stupid mode instantly. I don't like the way females are treated on popular reddit post.
I was so frustrated with down votes and the feeling of you believe with me or your stupid and lack of engagement I tried out lobste.rs but the audience is so small that the front page is 80% static for days.
Incidentally, I will probably never see if you reply to this.
If you are trying to compare /r/programming to HN, you really don't understand the purpose of either I should think.
One thing I will say is on HN, after like 3 or 4 comments within 10 minutes I usually can't post another comment again for another 30+ minutes (I've never been able to quantify the amount of comments required to trigger the throttle and how long it lasts). So it's really difficult to have any type of quick, back and forth conversations / discussions on HN but on Reddit, even though they have a throttle, it's no where near as aggressive so it's more possible there. I'm not sure the HN throttle is necessarily bad but I know I don't enjoy its aggressiveness.
On the other hand, people are more polite and generally nicer on HN. Perhaps this is an inherent difference in the audience, or because the comment scores are hidden on HN.
A more interesting question is HN vs subreddits in general. /r/programming seems like a bad example.
HN is for general news, and new new things with deeper discussions. There's lots of noise on HN too, if all you want is news or programming related things. Lately, I think, 'intellectual-porn' has increased on HN (such as Wikipedia articles of mildly-interesting things), which I think are no different from cat pictures.
Quite often I spot something on Reddit, and then search HN for additional discussion.
(obviously you shouldn't follow the default subreddits, which are optimized for maximum addiction for general population)
When I do my comments tend to be better thought out, but I'll often have an opinion on something and choose to not comment for various reasons. Maybe my opinion was a bit too harsh, maybe others have a similar opinion and have already voiced it in their words, or maybe I realize its off topic.
IMO this is both a good thing and a bad thing. Sometimes I find myself not commenting when I could truly contribute to the discussion. On the flip side, there's also a lot less noise when trying to filter through the discussions.
Probably because I'm interested in quality discussion and generally more knowledgeable about the topics here. I'm also not impressed by typical reddit humor (pun threads, meta-jokes, purposeful mis-reading of comments).
I really like the AMAs and other than that I mostly stay out of reddit comment sections. Conversely, on HN, comments are the whole reason I'm here.
That said, the discussions on HN are usually about technical topics from technical people. It's far more intellectual than Reddit where a lot of the comments are puns, jokes, and other off-topic nonsense.
When an important technology is announced, or there's some important tech event, I really want to see what HN says first. It's more likely to be a focused and civil discussion due to the way it's moderated, and it's extremely likely that an engineer involved in the project or its history will come and personally contribute to the discussion. When I read a huge HN thread on an important topic, I feel like I'm largely educated about what experienced thinkers and specialists on the topic would say.
That said, Reddit has more breadth. There's not just /r/programming, there's subreddits for every specific language, technology, and specialty. Some are better curated and moderated than others but it's a deeper and richer set of information. There might occasionally be a story about OpenBSD around here, but reddit has http://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd.
I probably follow HN more closely, but I do like to see what bubbles up in specific subreddits as well.
HNers /behave/ more knowledgeably about startups and software.
> Is the user-base different?
No. White middle class men. Anything else is downvoted or not spoken of.[1]
> Is it just differences in karma/downvoting mechanics?
No, it's the YCombinator brand name that's making the difference. And the fact that HN is nowhere near as popular as reddit. (Popularity attracts even more white people, but especially those who would like to behave like spoiled brats.)
> Am I right to irrationally dislike reddit?
Yup. Find the right sub and you'll be fine.
(Edit) [1] As an example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9451652 . Anyone other than that demographic, with some critical thought in them, have already abandoned the use of "riots" [along with its corrolary, "thugs"] to refer to the protests, and are using either #BaltimoreProtests or #BaltimoreUprisings . In that linked debate, not a single leading commentary disputes... wait for it... the very title.
i prefer to create my own multireddits for content technical content i'm interested in discussing. one for languages, open source, web, mobile, or computer science theory. these would be impossible to find on HN but on reddit they often attract more serious comments (not perfect).
also, did you ask this same question on reddit? i'm wary of the implicit selection bias in asking for a comparison from HN users and not reddit. the users on HN who take the time to read and respond to something like this are more than likely to prefer HN to reddit.
The psychology is a little different, here. Since there's no equivalent of user-created and moderated subreddits, it's hard to associate the same feelings of identity and ownership. As a result, ironic on account of the smaller userbase, I tend to think of Hacker News as a more public space than reddit. Hacker News is more impersonal and sterile, but in a good way. Reddit is the equivalent of bullshitting with the neighbors over a few beers and a barbecue.
Both are good. It's hard to speak of my time here in terms of a migration, or switch from, reddit.
When I went to Reddit without logging in (and saw the content of the standard subreddits), I was SHOCKED at how stupid it was. I frequent a bunch of smaller, focused subreddits and really enjoy it... most of the time. I have to say, I've never been scared to voice an opinion on HN like I have been on Reddit. This is a much more civil place, especially when I'm wrong about something.
Reddit is a versatile tool for building any kind of community you want. However, Reddit itself is not the herald of any kind of value. Like facebook groups, multi-purpose weakens meaning.
HN was born from the core values of YCombinator. It's a tangible proof of the tribe built around hacking and entrepreneurship. Meaning and Visuals are tightly coupled. Even the language it's written on (Arc) is an integral part of the overarching theme.
Tons of groups, and very very low barrier. Flamewars, trolls and idiots are everywhere, and finding a quiet corner for intellectual studies is hard to find... but it is doable.
There are also such thing as invite only / private subreddits, which somewhat compare to moderated usenet subs.
I would like to say HN is simply generally more sophisticated, but some of my highest-voted comments on HR are sarcastic remarks (criticising the US seems to equal free karma).
HN would fit in as a subreddit on Reddit. In fact, I'd wager that if there was a subreddit /r/hackernews it would look almost exactly the same as this website.
There is, and it does (but only because it literally is just a mirror of HN on reddit)
A community that generates a nearly identical content feed seems plausible enough. I doubt the character of the comments would be the same, though. Beyond the obvious fact that HN is a more focused and less populous community, the structure, context, and presentation of the reddits must have effects on the psychology of their users.
Even if you were to replicate the HN content feed exactly on a private subreddit, with the same set of members and the same set of moderators, you'd see a different character to the comments.
Context, for the curious?
I cannot think of a meaning your question might have that is not answered by the intro of this article. (sorry if I got that wrong)
I'd say that you are wrong to irrationally like/dislike anything.
As the population of any online site grows, you get the least common denominator. The smaller subreddits are still good, but /r/programming got too big.
Furthermore, there is a far wider variety of users on /r/programming. This increases the signal to noise ratio, and reduces opportunity for higher-quality content and comments to float to the top.
And, one cannot discuss HN and /r/programming without discussing the moderators -- they are the curators of content submitted and the comment discussions, after all. I would haphazard to guess that the similarities between the two groups are more closely aligned than the user-bases themselves.
As for my personal opinion -- I feel far more inclined to contribute to HN as my writing on /r/programming is more likely to be lost in the void, akin to pissing into an ocean.
It depends. Do you like a fatherly figure to make you do stuff for your own good even if you're now in your thirties? Do you enjoy censoring yourself for the fear of being hellbanned? Do you get a kick out of seeing your comments become unreadable because you wrote something against the prevalent opinion? Do you mind being gently molded into an echo box of what's hip right now in the Silicon Valley culture? Are you so focused on patting yourself on the back that you don't realize that subreddits are actually different forums with different administration and moderation policies?
P.S.: do you like having to wait an unspecified amount of time before being able to post your comment because you've been suspiciously active lately?