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Ask HN: Why has HackerNews succeeded despite the rise of Reddit?

• visarga 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.).
    • aburan28 10y ago
      Hacker news is concise bc its just one page unlike Reddit which requires users to find the best subreddits which people don't have time for
    • stcredzero 10y ago
      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.
• protomyth 10y ago
  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.
• buckbova 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    To be fair, there are echo chamber moments on HN too. It's just I think we are much more self-aware here.
• ams6110 10y ago
  HN is narrowly focused. Narrow focus leads to higher quality. Higher quality keeps people around.
• okket 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    >avatar images Wait what? Reddit doesn't have avatar images
    • Maken 10y ago
      Lots of subreddits have a per-subreddit avatar extension of some sort.
    • okket 10y ago
      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.
• dccoolgai 10y ago
  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.
• Jack000 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
• cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  Same reason why AirBnB is successful even though there's Craigslist.
  • Maken 10y ago
    A sane way to navigate the contents?
• martinko 10y ago
  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.
• djent 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        I agree, the Karma and voting here are harsh. It's really hard to get upvotes, especially on sensitive topics.
        • djent 10y ago
• laocoon 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
• elevensies 10y ago
  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.
  • xan0v 10y ago
    Great job, this hits on all the reasons I would state.
  • dfsegoat 10y ago
    Absolutely right on with your points #1 and #2. I remember I lost half my karma with the first childish comment I made on HN. Now I only comment if I feel strongly and can speak intelligently on a subject, or have a question. It is a natural curation process.
  • dogma1138 10y ago
    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.
• djur 10y ago
  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.
• TenOhms 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
• proactivesvcs 10y ago
  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.
• notadoc 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
• akhilcacharya 10y ago
  HN targets a different demographic with stricter moderation.
• corysama 10y ago
  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.
• dasil003 10y ago
  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.
• pbreit 10y ago
  The focus and YC connection.
• sidcool 10y ago
  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.
• detaro 10y ago
  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.
• kzisme 10y ago
  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.
• simbalion 10y ago
  philosophy and moderation.
• imh 10y ago
  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.
• gscott 10y ago
  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).
• WA 10y ago
  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.
• deadringerr 10y ago
  To put it simply: I feel comfortable reading Hacker News at work while I would never step foot on Reddit at work.
• Bahamut 10y ago
  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.
• PieterH 10y ago
  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.
• PieterH 10y ago
  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.
• WhoBeI 10y ago
  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.
• IanCal 10y ago
  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.
• endswapper 10y ago
  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.
• mrsteveman1 10y ago
  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.
• drivingmenuts 10y ago
  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.
• p333347 10y ago
  UI. Reddit seems like a busy fish market while HN seems like a relaxing lounge.
• tzs 10y ago
  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.
• mcphage 10y ago
  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.
• joveian 10y ago
  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.
• CM30 10y ago
  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'.
• johncalvinyoung 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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.
• xbmcuser 10y ago
  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.
• tychuz 10y ago
  Because of the circlejerk.
• throwaway2016a 10y ago
  For me it too hard to separate out signal from noise on Reddit. HN for the most part separates it out for me.