Not in the beginning. There used to be a site that measured the time between when a story got to the homepage of slashdot vs. Digg. It was a tossup for a while but eventually Digg started winning out which is when I stopped reading slashdot. Then when Digg started to get inundated with non-tech related stuff, I switched to reddit which was mostly tech focused at the time (see [1]) and once that started to get filled with politics and other garbage, I finally found and switched to HN.
The same happened to Digg and reddit. Digg started lagging behind reddit (things would show up on Digg's front page an hour or two after they showed up on reddits'), which then started lagging behind HN (at least r/programming).
1 - http://www.wired.com/2014/01/the-gentrification-of-reddit-in...