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 den

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.