
Ask HN: Why has HackerNews succeeded despite the rise of Reddit? - ErikVandeWater
It is unusual that HackerNews is still a powerful, vibrant community despite Reddit&#x27;s rise:<p>- Every subject you can find on HackerNews is also found on Reddit: programming, entrepreneurship, academic news, etc.<p>- HN celebrities don&#x27;t participate that often, so I don&#x27;t think that is the difference<p>- Reddit has more features (esp. when combined with RES)<p>How do you explain the success of HN despite the rise of reddit, and does this mean other reddit-style communities might succeed despite their similarity to Reddit?
======
elevensies
This is my off the cuff opinion, I won't really try to substantiate it or
anything.

Hacker News has a moderation policy and mod team that gives the discussion
some very desirable characteristics:

\- a sort of professional level of conversation is maintained. Roughly
equivalent to a casual conversation with a co-worker, over lunch, is sort of
the overall tone.

\- general rejection of memes and shitposting as being against the purpose of
the site -- the point is real discussion an exchange of information, not low
effort karma generation

\- Paul Graham's essay about different levels of disagreement: generally
people attempt to discuss the core ideas of the posts and not just hammer away
to trivilaties

Most of the programming related subreddits don't have anything like the
overall tone, cohesiveness, or moderator activity/discipline of Hacker News.
There are some subreddits that I would say are as good as Hacker News for
discussions about their chosen topic, for example,
[http://reddit.com/r/spacex](http://reddit.com/r/spacex) . But the overall
programming subreddits are not equal to this.

~~~
dogma1138
As far as the moderation goes it is both pretty well moderated and the
moderation staff unlike Reddit isn't involved in the "politics" of a specific
subreddit.

Reddit moderation tends to boil down to camps and high school politics pretty
darn quickly where it's more common than not for moderators to push their own
agendas.

This is overall a pretty broken moderation model which only really works on
private forums.

You need to have a "professional" (joblike) moderation where the moderator
enforce rules rather than opinions and philosophies.

On the other side of the spectrum you can have a "detached" core-rules only
extreme violations level of moderation which what makes places like 4/8Chan
work even tho it seems that they aren't moderated at all.

~~~
rabz
The only subreddits in my experience that approach this "professional,"
disinterested standard of moderation are /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians. I
know AH has a huge team devoted to enforcing their rules, and it's off-putting
to newcomers from other subs but absolutely makes AH what it is. AS takes more
of an unapologetic scorched earth approach to keeping focus on relevant
discussion.

------
djent
I come to Hacker News for the comments. Reddit comments sections usually are
filled with jokes and chit-chat rather than further information on the
subject. In addition, Hacker News has a better moderating system I feel, in
that dang and possibly others are always reading comments and detatching off-
topic threads and banning disruptive users.

That doesn't mean Hacker News is perfect, but it's the best I've found so far.

~~~
henrik_w
I very much agree with this. I quite often check the comments before the story
on HN. On reddit (programming), the comments are rarely as good as on HN.
Also, the turnover of stories on Reddit is much slower.

~~~
csydas
For the time being, the standard for discussion on HN just tends to be better.
Not "civil" or inoffensive, but more in that discussion seems to be the focus.
The idea of "on topic" or at least "good" discussion seems well understood by
commenters, and most of the time it seems like people are okay with either
posting specifically to the topic or thread at hand, or they're happy just not
commenting and simply voting.

The very idea that people collect here to talk about a topic at hand means
that it's keeps the conversation a bit higher than elsewhere. I don't think
I've ever seen people here push their number of upvotes as something that
mattered. There is a lot of buy-in from users to ignore joke comments, even if
they're on-topic jokes. How the community became like this I can't say since I
have only been here about half a year/year I think, but it's a refreshing
change of pace when you just want to discuss something.

~~~
monk_e_boy
I agree, the Karma and voting here are harsh. It's really hard to get upvotes,
especially on sensitive topics.

~~~
alimw
> It's really hard to get upvotes, especially on sensitive topics.

It's kinda crazy what people here are "sensitive" about! For example, today I
have managed to offend Hacker News by questioning the universality of maths.
It's a subject on which I am rather qualified to have an opinion, but since it
does not match others' I got downvoted. That's just a recipe for homogeneity.

~~~
lewisl9029
This is honestly my biggest issue with HN as well. The community has a
tendency to downvote well-reasoned, substantive posts simply to express
disagreement. I think this is poisonous behavior that will eventually turn HN
into yet another echo chamber if left unchecked.

I think downvotes should be removed entirely. Either flag a post for being
off-topic, inappropriate or adding nothing of substance to the discussion, or
reply with a counter argument to express disagreement to well-written posts
that deserve it. The ability to silence opinions different to your own with
minimal effort can only hurt the quality of discussion here, in my opinion.

~~~
monk_e_boy
Slashdots different types of karma were great: Insightful, Informative,
Interesting, Funny... you could add Agree, Disagree and a few others.

------
TenOhms
Reddit is like a huge shopping mall, lots of shops for all kinds of interests
in one place. In such a mall, it doesn't matter if you only ever shop at that
one store you like, you will always encounter the quirks of other shoppers at
the same mall.

HN is like an upscale department store hidden in a well manicured industrial
park. Most visitors, I imagine, are there to enhance their self actualization,
not just follow the latest fads in fashion and things to do on a Saturday.

When I first stumbled across HN years ago I was intrigued how vibrant this
little-known community was. I noticed that the quality of posts here was much
higher than any other tech forum I had seen. People were much more serious
when it suited the topic and humor had real effort behind it when humor was
called for.

And when I first noticed a silly Reddit-style meme, the Meme Active Defense
(MAD) system kicked in and the poster got down-voted to oblivion, told to
return to Reddit and that was that.

~~~
zo7
I was going to say something similar but this is a really good analogy.

One thing I might say differently however is that most people on Reddit don't
come to the mall to go to their favorite shops, they come to the mall to come
to the mall -- the fact that their favorite shops are there comes secondary.
You can try to have a lot of specialized communities with high-quality content
and thoughtful discussion, but to a lot of users these places are just
sideshows in a site that they go to primarily for entertainment.

------
dasil003
Subreddits are essentially a hack to account for the well-understood fact that
as a discussion-oriented community grows, it trends towards the lowest common
denominator, and the interesting people either leave or are drowned out by
self-referential memes and other detritus left by people with nothing of real
value to add. This phenomenon has been well understood for decades since we
started seeing the mass influx of people into message boards (see The Eternal
September).

Social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc) achieved real scale by forcing people
to connect with one another in order to create de-facto smaller communities,
which has the effect of giving focus to your stream, but it dilutes the
ability to have a topical discussion with the best set of participants (unless
they happen to know each other already).

I believe HN succeeded because all this history was well understood by pg when
he created it, and he had the following to seed it with the right group of
people to maintain the culture that he wanted. It's actually no small feat
because once you birth an internet community it takes on its own life and you
can't really control it directly. I'm surprised and delighted that HN can
exist in 2016; over the years I've spent on Usenet, Slashdot, Digg, Twitter
and Reddit, the internet has only gotten more bombastic and shrill, but HN
maintains a bar that is as good as anything I remember stretching back to the
80s.

------
endswapper
It is the community.

Everything else described in the other comments is a function of one of the
communities.

This is a worthwhile question and an important point for anyone who
participates in the community. It's most likely relevant to your professional
life, whether you are working on a startup, at one, or you are just
interested.

The better, question, or perhaps, just the follow up, is, "How does HN
cultivate its community and how does it engineer for desired results."

For me, I learned about Y Combinator through the "How to Start a Startup"
podcast. I listened while I was developing. I learned about Hacker News
through applying to Y Combinator. I later learned about Office Hours through
Hacker News. Through participating in Office Hours I received AWS credits to
help support my startup.

The point is that I received a significant value from Hacker News before I
ever extended myself. I now have a real commitment to the Hacker News
community. I'm also a little embarrassed it took me so long to become a
worthwhile participant.

Demonstrating that value, and inspiring that commitment, is at least part of
how they cultivate the community, and engineer for desired results, which
results in the success you are pondering.

------
corysama
In addition to everything else mentioned here, I'll add that moderation is a
lot more tight and well done than most subreddits. The HN community set up an
expectation early on that comments get voted down if they are of a style that
encourages more noise and less substance. Sarcasm, humor, references, memes,
even "nice post!" comments get voted down.

This is because those type of comments are extremely easy to make and very
easy to grok and vote up. Their easiness leads them to swamp out high-effort,
high-content posts. The more they are tolerated, the more they are seen. This
feedback loop eventually leads to a Digg-like sea of recycled garbage. HN has
been inevitably slipping... But, the sea has been held back much longer than I
expected already.

------
mcphage
Part of it is, I think, subreddits tend to get very narrowly defined—as you
mentioned, programming, entrepreneurship, academic news, etc. Whereas HN is
programming+entrepreneurship+academic news. So rather than different
communities for each discussion, you get a broader community that can discuss
a number of things. Reddit _could_ have such a subreddit, but generally that's
not how Redditors _do_ things.

A second is, I think, that you get abilities more slowly. You can't downvote
comments until, what, 500 karma? Rather than it being easy to make sockpuppets
to downvote a group you dislike.

A third is, HN is a lot smaller. Much lower traffic, it's more out-of-the-way,
so it has more adults discussing their jobs. And there are fewer random
passers-by who already have commenting, upvoting, and downvoting rights—able
to interrupt the community without needing to actually be a part of it.

And a fourth is, HN is pretty well moderated. That's definitely a good thing
when trying to maintain your signal-to-noise ratio.

------
djur
Hacker News has better moderation and content grooming than the big subreddits
(r/programming and the like). The smaller topic-specific subreddits tend to be
better, but you'd have to subscribe to a lot of them to match the variety of
subjects that are covered on HN, and there's frequently more depth than I want
on a regular basis. I like to see discussion of interesting new Rust features,
for instance, but I don't necessarily want to read about it every day.

In short: HN is a more controlled, limited experience, which is preferable for
me because I neither need nor want to spend the time necessary to craft my own
out of the raw materials of Reddit.

------
Bahamut
I think there is a simple explanation - it has managed to become a gathering
place of intellectuals. HN is not too much different from reddit from a
technical viewpoint, so nothing there shows success/failure. Content is the
main driver here.

IMO, HN's moderation is too weak and allows onerous behavior with
downvoting/flagging, even sometimes resulting in important discussions about
subjects in tech getting squashed. However, Reddit allows debasing of other
people and some of this behavior is acceptable behavior there.

This cements in my mind that while HN is not perfect, it still has managed to
attract a critical mass of people to sustain & bring in newcomers who are
interested in a more welcoming environment to diverse ideas and meeting enough
criteria to a broad enough audience to keep a balance.

------
mrsteveman1
One of the things I value about HN is that it operates with a global set of
rules and impartial moderators, rather than giving a handful of arbitrary
users near total control over specific areas of discussion simply because one
of them registered the name of a subreddit first.

It seems like it works well here, there's a different "vibe" to the community,
perhaps due to a typically more narrow focus, with some exceptions, and a set
of users who have more in common with each other than a general site like
Reddit.

The delegated authority system on Reddit does have some advantages, for
example the /r/science moderators choose to impose strict rules on discussion,
preventing the mob from turning every thread in to long chains of jokes and
memes. They also tightly regulate "flair", allowing people who really do have
expertise in a specific field to prove it _to the moderators_ , and then have
all of their comments tagged with that information.

Certain areas are far more permissive for the same reason, which also has its
place on such a large site.

The downside can be easily seen on some subreddits, where again allowing
arbitrary users to have near total control has a much more negative effect. A
small number of moderators can prevent specific topics from being discussed on
their subreddit _at all_. That effect is even worse when the subreddit in
question is one of the very large defaults, like /r/news. There are also
subreddits that will completely ban someone from participating simply for
having participated in another completely unrelated subreddit.

------
proactivesvcs
Very little functional cruft. No visual clutter so it's much easier to consume
and less distracting. Mature discourse, which is particularly striking when
people don't agree. Quite a wide range of articles in one quick-to-load/render
page - a single HTTPS request. No third-party assets, tracking or adverts.
It's like a paradise in a sea of effluent.

------
okket
See also the "How do you use HN?" thread

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12418891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12418891)

My main reason why I like HN over Reddit is not what HN has, but what it not
has: inlined GIFs, avatar images, signature lines, etc. Focus on content > all
for me.

Reddit has great content, but it never clicked for me like HN did (maybe
because I can remember Usenet and still like mailing lists). But things can
change, e.g. if HN gets user hostile with ads or "features"...

~~~
gruez
>avatar images

Wait what? Reddit doesn't have avatar images

~~~
okket
Ok, sorry, I admit, I haven't checked. Just tried to summarising the whole
"social signalling" features other sites have. They work and they are good,
but they also are repetitive. Some people can live without this "noise" and
prefer bare bones sites like HN.

I'd even argue that you can write more freely if you are not tied to your
avatar, signature lines, etc. -> your arguments stand on their own.

------
WA
Your question reads a bit like: Why isn't there only one bar all the people go
to get drunk but several?

Most cities have more than one bar and everyone has their favorite, which
isn't the same bar for everyone.

I guess it's a thousand small things, but mostly how people _feel_ when
reading HN compared to Reddit. Different atmosphere for different people.

------
visarga
Reddit is too diverse and commenting level is pretty low, especially in the
most popular subreddits. Here the number of kittens and memes is just about
right. I'd like to see a reddit "defluffer" that blocks all unsubstantial
posts (10 second rule, if it takes less than 10 seconds to consume, reject it)
and comments (by reading level?).

~~~
ErikVandeWater
What do you mean by "too diverse"? Is filtering by subreddit not sufficient to
find the right niche?

I wonder because it seems someone could emulate HN simply by unsubscribing
from the defaults and subscribing to HN-related subreddits (programming,
startups, etc.).

~~~
stcredzero
_What do you mean by "too diverse"?_

He probably means that the "Lowest Common Denominator" level is too low.
Probably not that, even, after a more careful analysis. More like the average
is pulled too low, because the "Level" is weighted by volume, and the loudest
voices are often the stupidest.

------
notadoc
HN has a targeted audience, infinitely more professional, capable of
intellectual discussion, it is not filled with trolls and insults or other
unrelated nonsensical banter, there is far less clickbait and trash online
marketing spam, etc.

Reddit is basically generic internet comments but with a mob mentality, full
of trolls and garbage links, the whole thing is reminiscent of a filthy public
toilet that you wouldn't want to use. The early days weren't like that and
maybe there are subreddits that are still not like that, but I find the whole
experience distasteful.

~~~
lotharbot
Of particular note on the "more professional" front -- many HN members are
here because they're connected to a YC company in some way, and many others
are here because they work in the industry and want to build connections with
others also in the industry (but not linkedin-style connections; actual we-
have-discussed-technical-topics connections). There are people here who have
found work through the monthly Who's Hiring threads.

The net result is that there's a strong professional ethos and strong
incentive to maintain it from a lot of people in the community, such that the
few who try to troll, post garbage, etc. tend to get voted down into oblivion
and calmly told they don't belong.

------
johncalvinyoung
Signal to noise ratio, in comments and in content both. I was a loyal Slashdot
reader (and comment lurker) for many years before coworkers introduced me to
HN. I was stunned with the high-signal qualities of the main page results--I
almost never visit without reading multiple links off the main page. The
selection of what is currently considered interesting by the mods/voting
process fairly closely maps to interests of my own. I like, among other
things, that 'old' articles and links are permitted, but signposted that
they're not current.

And yes, the comment threads are healthier than elsewhere, and the signal
ratio tends to be high enough to be worth reading from time to time. I don't
read comments every day, but I do read Ask HN posts from time to time, and on
particularly current and relevant articles. Likely enough to find interesting
discussion contributing to the topic to be worth the time reading.

So yes, HN is one of my top visited sites now, and has pretty much completely
supplanted reading Slashdot...I've gone from visiting ./ multiple times per
day to looking it up once a month when I'm bored, just on the off chance they
picked up something I'd missed elsewhere.

~~~
veddox
> I don't read comments every day

Actually, the comments are probably more important to me than the stories. A
lot of the programming-related front-page stories are a little too technical
for me (as a mere hobby programmer), but every now and then there will be an
article on some other topic that I am _really_ interested in, and I will
thoroughly enjoy the discussion that ensues on that article in the comments.

------
Jack000
HN is to Reddit as Time magazine is to People. They're the same format (and
often the same links), but the comments here are generally more knowledgeable
and reasoned, free from memes and sophomoric tit-for-tat arguments.

The comments are the content.

~~~
la0coon
I think that's a good analogy. I don't read either magazine, so I can't
comment specifically, but I get your gist, and I agree. Comments make this
community better.

------
IanCal
People have mentioned really generic things but something concrete is that the
voting system is different on HN, with limits on downvotes in different
situations. That helps limit "I don't like this" downvotes, even if it doesn't
eliminate them, since people new to the community cannot downvote.

------
dccoolgai
HN has a critical mass of readers. There is something to knowing that you are
reading the same stuff as the Big Boys - a watercooler effect. Even if there
is interesting stuff on Reddit, it's not the stuff industry leaders are
reading and thinking...or at least that's the perception become reality.

------
laocoon
If I have ten minutes in an Uber or something to waste time, I almost always
default to Reddit. I can give quick skims to an article and save it if it is
something I would like to come back to later. But it's generally a low-
attention, something-to-do-to-pass-the-time community for me. I hardly ever
come to HN unless I know I am willing to work my mind a little bit. I have
faith the posts and comments that I see will be generally well written, but I
also acknowledge that if I want to get anything out of it, I can't breeze
through it as easily as I can Reddit.

Note: I am not an active contributor to either community - just someone who
reads the articles and comments and votes up the things I like.

~~~
cardiffspaceman
Counterpoint: I visit HN while waiting at Starbucks. I usually only manage to
pick one article or read one comment on a thread. My personal anticipation is
that visiting Reddit under the same circumstances would be a waste of precious
battery chemistry. I do visit Reddit from home using non-stored electricity,
and I enjoy "yo mama joke" threads a great deal.

------
deadringerr
To put it simply: I feel comfortable reading Hacker News at work while I would
never step foot on Reddit at work.

------
protomyth
I guess for me it just feels like Reddit requires more effort than HN. I have
an account on Reddit but I really am in read-only mode because it looks like I
would have a lot of friction to any action.

------
gscott
Venture capitalists and high level employees from SV companies read Hacker
News. If you have something to offer and want to get noticed you can do so
here. I raised $15,000 from a person I met on HN. I have to pivot the product
since I was not successful (and have been taking a break before doing so) but
if you have the right personality (patio11) this site can change your life
dramatically (friendly, intelligent, have something you can share).

------
kzisme
As others have said - many of the comments on Reddit are very low level and
meaningless.

HN is more curated and is less of a content churning machine than Reddit.

------
detaro
HN is an interesting mix, vs subreddits having a focus area.

partly because of this, larger reddit communities tend to be even more
repetitive than HN.

Different content guidelines and moderation policies.

The last two points mean that most reddit communities have way worse signal-
noise-ratio for me, which makes reading them tedious. The first means you have
to deal with stuff you probably don't care about on HN, but I generally can
just ignore those threads completely (basically anything involving politics.
It's tempting to take part in the brawling, but it's better for me to just
ignore them.)

For small niche-topics, subreddits can work, but I prefer traditional forums
even more. The news format and the focus on external links just doesn't allow
for proper long-term discussions, which are often the most valuable in small
communities. 150-page phpbb threads for a long-evolving topic are unwieldly,
but still better than sifting through hundreds or thousands of submissions on
reddit or HN, each of which rehashes the same basics over and over.

------
buckbova
Left Digg some years ago for Reddit. Left Reddit couple years ago for HN. The
hive mind echo chamber drove me away from each.

~~~
noobermin
To be fair, there are echo chamber moments on HN too. It's just I think we are
much more self-aware here.

------
imh
Moderation and rules. Things like mods deleting comments, changing titles of
posts to be less clickbait, and I think even changing links sometimes to more
substantive coverage of the same story determine what is acceptable here.
Voting is semi-restricted too. You can't downvote when you start out.

------
CM30
I'd say the main reason is curation; Hacker News has a lot of interesting
content to be found in a single place. Okay, Reddit has some of that too, but
it's split across hundreds of sections of which the vast majority of the
content is just typical news or discussions. Feels like Hacker News provides a
more rounded, more varied selection of things to read, and has more of a focus
on said content being unique rather than it being new.

Feels like a 'best of' list made up of submissions from 20 or 30 subreddits.

I guess the quality of the discussion is better here as well, though I have to
say it's generally pretty good on a lot of forums and subreddits, assuming
they're not so popular to have been reduced to the level of the 'lowest common
denominator'.

------
ams6110
HN is narrowly focused. Narrow focus leads to higher quality. Higher quality
keeps people around.

------
tzs
The next four paragraphs will seem irrelevant to the question at hand, but
they are not, so bear with me for a moment.

I've got a bachelor's degree in math from Caltech. Caltech requires every
undergraduate to take a broad range of science courses, so besides math I've
got a pretty good science background in general.

After school I became a programmer, and have been a console games programmer,
a Unix kernel hacker and porter, an embedded OS architect, wrote reference
SCSI firmware and device drivers for a major chip maker, wrote network bridge
and router firmware, did assorted consumer software, and have done a lot of
back end stuff including a PCI compliant credit card storage and billing
system. In other words, I've got a pretty wide programming background.

At some point in there, I took a break and went to law school, taking every
intellectual property course and every tax course they offered, and did
particularly well in evidence, constitutional law, and first amendment law.
About 99% of the way through I decided I'd rather be a programmer who knew a
lot about law than a lawyer who knew a lot about programming.

I also read a lot on a wide variety of subjects, and have taken a few MOOCs in
areas outside my prior work or school experience. I wouldn't say that I'm
particularly educated on such subjects, but I seem to have a knack for
remembering the odd interesting fact from such endeavors that will later later
turn out to come up in general discussion.

Consider /r/technology. Discussion there usually involves technology, and
quite often involves the impact of that technology on law or the impact of the
law on that technology. The same is also true of much of the discussion here
on HN.

On HN my combination of backgrounds in math/science and law is an asset in
such discussions. If I post a long comment full of citations to back my
claims, with most of the claims being matters of fact rather than matters of
opinion, that will generally either get up voted or will not get votes.

On HN, it seems people like learning things from comments, even if those
things might contradict what they thought was true. (This is one of the main
reasons I don't mind submissions to paywalled articles that I cannot get to
for free--if the article is interesting I'll probably learn something
interesting from the HN comments, and people usually provide enough context
that not having read the paywalled article is usually not even a hinderance).

On /r/technology, it will get up votes if it backs the popular opinion. If it
goes against the popular opinion it will get a lot of down votes, often enough
that it is hidden by default.

On many subreddits, people seem to want the comments to be a safe space where
they will have their existing beliefs validated.

Because of this when I start to write a comment on reddit I now try to limit
myself to comments that will only take a couple of minutes or so to write at
most, except on small, specialized subreddits. It's just not worth taking the
time to actually do research and fact checking before posting on the larger
subreddits because of the risk that the comment will get buried by down votes.

I assume that many of the same reasons that make me put more effort into my HN
comments than my reddit comments also apply to other people here. The net
result is that HN has a higher fraction of useful comments, and a higher
fraction of smart, open minded readers. These reinforce each other, and keep
the site viable.

In a way the bigger subreddits, like /r/technology, remind me of high school
and HN reminds me of college.

In high school I was almost always the smartest kid in the room (and usually
"kid" could be replaced with "person" without changing the accuracy of the
statement). At Caltech, I was almost never the smartest person in the room if
the room was bigger than a bathroom or an elevator. Caltech was infinitely
more fun than high school, because it is a lot more fun to be surrounded by
people smarter than you than it is to be the smartest person.

In a subreddit like /r/technology or /r/programming, there usually isn't
enough information to rank people more than coarsely than maybe quintiles, but
I usually seem to be in the top quintile.

On HN there are plenty of commentators, both regular and occasional, who are
clearly smarter than me. I seem to be about average here. That's a lot more
fun.

~~~
nkurz
_I assume that many of the same reasons that make me put more effort into my
HN comments than my reddit comments also apply to other people here. The net
result is that HN has a higher fraction of useful comments, and a higher
fraction of smart, open minded readers. These reinforce each other, and keep
the site viable._

I think this is a key observation: HN started with a very slightly positive
feedback loop for quality comments, and over time this built up to a
considerable advantage. If HN ever collapses, it will likely be because some
other feedback loop with greater gain drowns this out.

My guess is that for most discussion sites (Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc) the
desire for profit eventually prioritizes higher traffic over quality of
discussion. My hope is that HN will remain mostly immune to this due to its
(debatably) not-for-profit nature.

[By the way, I thought your comment was brilliant, likely due to the care you
put into writing it. To recoup some of the effort, you might consider putting
some of the details of your background into the About section of your profile
page.]

------
PieterH
I've used both daily for some years. They are different. Reddit is far larger
and often more fun. Yet it can rapidly become silly, and in some cases quite
violent. HN is always poilte, fresher, and serious. I come here to get
discussion about things that matter, and go to Reddit for distraction. HN can
be hostile too, yet the mob here rarely uses outright "why don't you kill
yourself?" violence.

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joveian
Besides what others have said about moderation and general lack of features, I
wanted to add that hckrnews.com is a really beautiful interface that all news
sites should copy IMO. I think the interaction between hckrnews.com readers
and home page readers may add something that either interface alone would miss
and at least it appeals to people with significantly different styles of news
reading.

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drivingmenuts
HN is a bit more serious and bit more focused than Reddit. Reddit has so much
content, that it becomes a distraction (esp. if you wander off into some of
the toxic train-wreck sub-Reddits).

That said, if I want even more concentrated tech news, I like Lobste.rs, which
doesn't have political sidetracks. At least with Lobste.rs, I don't feel the
need to comment, even when I know I shouldn't.

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martinko
Subreddits that are interesting in some way have a tendency of growing and
thereby losing quality. I suppose that the fact that HN is a different site
with barriers to access (slight) would limit new users to those who are really
interested in the community. Add to that the strict moderation of topics
(mainly by user voting) and you get a 'subreddit' that loses quality slower.

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xbmcuser
I use both but don't use Reddit for tech news. From my personal experience on
hacker news the contrary opinion does surface a lot more in the discussions
and people only join a conversation when they feel something needs to be added
to the discussion rather than piling on the side of the popular opinion.

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WhoBeI
Because of us. Seriously. You are doing a fantastic job of staying on topic
and moderating/down voting away disruptive elements while still allowing the
"other side" to have their say.

It's frankly amazing how often a short comment on HN will get me to delve into
a subject I didn't even realize I was interested in.

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p333347
UI. Reddit seems like a busy fish market while HN seems like a relaxing
lounge.

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akhilcacharya
HN targets a different demographic with stricter moderation.

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throwaway2016a
For me it too hard to separate out signal from noise on Reddit. HN for the
most part separates it out for me.

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cocktailpeanuts
Same reason why AirBnB is successful even though there's Craigslist.

~~~
Maken
A sane way to navigate the contents?

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sidcool
Traffic wise HN is tiny compared to HN. When I first joined Reddit, it was for
/r/programming and /r/science

The quality there has since gone bad. But other subreddits have flourished. HN
on the other hand is dedicated to nerdy/geeky/all tech stuff.

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pbreit
The focus and YC connection.

------
simbalion
philosophy and moderation.

