Reddit is much more social. What I mean is people just post whatever whenever, and a lot of times it's bullshit. You wouldn't know unless you're knowledgeable a

Reddit is much more social. What I mean is people just post whatever whenever, and a lot of times it's bullshit. You wouldn't know unless you're knowledgeable about that topic/domain, and even then actual experts can be downvoted if what they say goes against that subreddit's hivemind. Each subreddit has a hivemind that you need to be aware of. The few exceptions are subreddits that are moderated with an iron fist: /r/AskHistorians, and to a lesser degree, /r/neutralpolitics. I think everyone being anonymous is a big factor. Source: I've used reddit under various anonymous handles since 2012. I've only been using HN for ~3 years now (lurking, mostly) but I've noticed that a lot more people use their real names and identities. I would think that helps towards not spouting bullshit without resources. (but controversial threads, e.g. highly political ones, tend to throw that out the window). Lobste.rs has the concept of "hats" that are given to specific people, and they can wear them to answer something in a specific capacity. [0] I wish HN had something like that. HN is moderated enough that I think a system like that could work. Other things about HN: 1) There are no thumbnails or image links, just links to articles or similar. Reddit suffers from images being allowed, because images take a few seconds to process and upvote, versus a longer article. Reddit is very good for sharing memes and cat pictures, but not so good for lengthy articles. Tild.es [1] is how reddit would be if it were text only (and orders of magnitude smaller). Picture and joke/meme replies also completely derail threads. 2) HN is highly focused and consistently moderated (in my opinion). At times more controversial discussion happens with political news, but it generally is focused on business / research / technology news, etc. Reddit is a mishmash of subreddits and each one is moderated differently (usually very minimally). With HN's culture I usually feel no need to comment on something unless I have experience with that or it's something I'm interested in. [0]: https://lobste.rs/hats https://lobste.rs/hats [1]: https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/