Hacker News is I believe a community of approximately 5 million readers at present and far fewer commenters. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon

Hacker News is I believe a community of approximately 5 million readers at present and far fewer commenters. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th... Dang says "The vast majority of logged-in users don't post and the vast majority of readers don't log in." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220098 While hacker news is perfectly usable without a login reddit is pretty much crud without the ability to login and select subreddits and has a readership over 30x bigger. Meanwhile a given subreddit usually has a much much smaller readership but readers in subreddits with radically different standards may be attracted from time to time by posts that link to another subs posts or by a particular post becoming sufficiently popular. Unlike hacker news these subs also don't have professional moderators paid to maintain their communities. If you don't like how a certain topical sub is run you ought to run your own and manage it how you like and tell us how it went.