[Pharmakon]

I’ve come to accept in a pretty short time that when it comes to subject matter experts in narrow fields, especially in IT and mathematics, this site has a lot to offer. Where almost everything else is concerned it’s just Reddit with more passive aggression. The obvious solution is acceptance, and avoidance, rather than hoping that scolding or bikeshedding is going to somehow change matters.

tl;dr HN is great at some things, and for the rest is just as good or bad as the rest of the internet, just with less humor and self-awareness.

[dwaltrip]

It's definitely a step above Reddit. The average comment is noticeably more informative. Yes, anything political can get messy and ugly sometimes, but I don't think it is comparable to most of Reddit. Certainly not the default subreddits.

There are subreddits that are higher quality for specific topics, but you have to go hunting to find them.

[sbmthakur]

Not to forget that the moderation is way better than any average subreddit.

[Pharmakon]

You have to hunt here too, unless you like seeing the same people get into the same fights every week. I’ve found many of the best comments nearer the bottom than the top. Meanwhile Reddits like /history, /compsci, /science, /math, /space, /physics, and /chemistry are all extremely well moderated, informative, and frankly tend to be less of a monoculture. I like HN, but it has some obvious issues that are baked into its dna as a VC-backed board.

Of course if you compare HN to /politics then HN is vastly superior, but then if you compare the average non-technical thread here to anything in /science HN comes off the worse for it. Even putting aside ideological pissing matches bikeshedding, semantic arguments and language wars, you get a lot of weird self-help stuff here that would be funny if people weren’t so desperately sincere about it.

[spectramax]

Yep, for anything non-polarizing or nationalistic, HN offers the most amazing and intellectual discourse.