[brk]

Yes, HN has become one of the best places to talk about things like this.

Reddit discussions become overrun with useless comments. Stupid memes, puns, and just other irrelevant drivel.

Many of the mainstream news outlets have lagging facts, horrible commenting (if any) and biased/washed/slanted reporting.

HN thoroughly discourages both worthless commenting and links to worthless news sources.

For me personally, I much prefer following stories like this on HN vs anywhere else.

[jewbacca]

Top comments in the primary Reddit thread at the time of this post (using 'top' sorting): https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3sphue/shootings...

1. Updated chronology of news with source links

2. Practically important publicization of #porteouverte effort

3. Updated chronology of news as experienced by Parisian local

4. First-person account of person who was present at theatre shooting

5. ... content-light junk starts. More than halfway down the page.

There's interesting commentary in this HN thread that I'm not seeing upvoted to visibility on Reddit, so it is valuable. But there is a ton of uniquely valuable stuff on the Reddit thread, and that is consistently the case in these live serious news situations.

----

And 10 minutes after I posted this, the top comment on this very HN thread and all its replies are all empty sentiment. "vive la france", "hearts go out", "be safe", etc.

[brk]

I don't want to sidetrack this with an HN vs. Reddit debate. The top story about this on Reddit has 14500+ comments. I couldn't really skim through them all in between the server timeouts, but it appears that the majority of them are non value-add.

As a story like this ages, my personal experience has been that the quality of comments on HN go UP while the quality of comments on Reddit go DOWN.

In regards to the parent post of this thread, I think that HN provides a valuable outlet for posting stories like this, and I personally feel it is within the overall HN "charter" for stories. It could turn out that this specific case balances out differently, but my personal opinion is that overall HN discussions for a given HN-worthy topic are more valuable than the comparative Reddit thread.

[spuz]

Not to say that this thread doesn't provide value but the Reddit thread is full of useful comments including information from people who are in paris. No memes or useless comments that I can see.