[mvp]

Oh that's interesting. I remember being hooked to reddit when it launched. And then after a while it started slipping and was happy to find HN (quite possibly through reddit or maybe pg essays) which was a bit like the original reddit, but much better.

[dang]

Precisely, and that was no accident, since the idea for both sites came from pg. Of course he knew it was in Reddit's interest to grow, but when it lost the property of being interesting for him personally to read, he created HN, a smaller sibling, and kept it that way by design.