The pattern on HN is less nuanced. A story or thread gets a bunch of low-effort comments, possibly ones that are bigoted or conspiratorial depending on the cont

The pattern on HN is less nuanced. A story or thread gets a bunch of low-effort comments, possibly ones that are bigoted or conspiratorial depending on the content of the story. Then the entire story is flagged and frozen to further comments. It's like dancing in your favorite club and suddenly having a surprising number of drunk finance bros grinding on you. But the music gets cut and lights go up. Everyone is forced to leave and re-enter, and when you are let back in, no finbros, better vibe, fun times again. In contrast, Reddit is like seeing everyone on the dance-floor having a grand time, most of the time. So you finally get up the nerve to dance and are immediately surrounded by 10 tiny incels all trying to hump your leg. But everyone else on the dance floor reassures you to just keep dancing and that everything will return to normal when one of the unpaid bouncers gets back from lunch. Edit: This is all made worse by the fact that Reddit, unlike HN, has a lot of incentives for people to post very personal stories. So even though Reddit mods can and do lock comments when things get too rough, that typically only happens when there's a critical mass of nastiness. Given that most stuff on the frontpage has 1000+ comments, that leaves room for dozens of abusive comments reaching the OP and only getting moderated later. So a woman posts a story about narrowly avoiding a date rape, initially receives a few dozen personal insults to her inbox, which get modded, leaving what ultimately looks like a wall of enthusiasm and support, encouraging lurkers to post, who also get initial personal insults, and so on...