Ask HN: Reddit vs. HN

HN has always had a bit more spirit of being friendly to the next person even if it's not always evident. The "comic book guy" tone is stronger on reddit.

I see HN as a more professional version of tech subreddits with a higher standard in both content posted and discussion. I still use reddit to find some stuff but reddit is a lot more laid back and intelligent discussion is less likely to happen on that platform IMHO.

I'm an avid Redditor that is migrating to HN. When I experience Reddit withdrawal (it's a thing!) I realize that in my experience HN is a much more intellectual community. By that, I mean that the general HN community seems more driven to teach and learn about all kinds of topics. Reddit has its fair share of that (with more diversity due to a larger user base) but intermingled with a slew of cat memes, etc. that really contribute nothing to my life. People in some demographics may use it to procrastinate doing work, but I am working on finding more productive ways to do so. Certain subreddits such as /r/personalfinance can be useful for life advice, however, and it seems that many more AMAs are done on Reddit than anywhere else.

I've found quite a bit of convergence when it comes to skepticism, realism, pragmatism, criticism, and like qualities.

Where HN differs the most to me is the lack of jokes or comments that really aren't directly related to the post. On Reddit, jokes, in-references, and memes are often very highly upvoted. On HN, that seems to be frowned upon and downvoted quickly.

If you stick to just the popular subreddits, you are doing yourself a disservice. Subreddit subscriptions are what make Reddit really nice.

If you are trying to compare /r/programming to HN, you really don't understand the purpose of either I should think.

Reddit is culturally focused to me, and younger and less intellectual/cerebral. Of course, by saying that, I'm sure there are outliers that can be posted that show how reddit can foster the most intellectual discussion possible! By cultural I mean it isn't much use for discussion about work/programming, nor is it an effective news aggregator on any level, but it is a great way to find humorous or entertaining content or discussions on popular culture.

In honesty, reddit doesn't attract a lot of the actually-hacking hacker crowd.

I go to reddit to see what consumers think and HN to see what producers think.

Reddit is more like an unbridled 'id' of people in a similar culture to HN. Witchhunts, trolling, nastiness, low-effort posting, are stereotypes of reddits most famous and popular areas, and for good reason. Almost every community of any size on reddit is a pretty intellectually barren place (shout out to the outliers like /r/askscience).

It is what it is, but you go to reddit to talk about video games and popular culture and cat pictures, and you go to HN to talk about coding, web development, and the many topics surrounding it.

It's like compare Facebook and Twitter. Surely you can try compare them, but better just use whatever you like to use.

HN certainly has a lot more startup and non-programming content than reddit. In my experience there is also a better balance between "early adopters" and "grumpy enterprise devs" (proggit in particular tends to be dominated by the latter, e.g. a lot of cynicism towards Node.js).

I would like to say HN is simply generally more sophisticated, but some of my highest-voted comments on HR are sarcastic remarks (criticising the US seems to equal free karma).

- HN's audience: Uptight, stuckup, megalomaniacal, tyrannical neckbeards who go on circular-jerk sessions where they mentally masturbate to tech topics and get into nerd fights to show their intellectual superiority and to compensate for their dismal managerial/people skills and the lack of a social life and romances.

- Reddit's audience: The polar opposite of the above category.

Make it rain, bitchezz! :)

I'm a user of both and I'd say both are great but both have deep-seated issues that make me wary of using either at all.

HN

HN is wonderful in that you're more likely to learn something from the comments and have an intellectual discussion. If you can get to the discussion fast enough. Or if that thread doesn't magically die off. Due to the lack of a notification system on HN, there are lots of dangling, empty comments.

The problem is that HN is very much "all or nothing". If you post an HN question, you're either going to get 200+ comments with people discussing the minutiae or you get a 0 comment thread going.

Sharing links on HN is the same way. 90% of the userbase stays on the front page without even clicking "next" on the bottom that means that there are 20+ threads at any given moment but they usually stay static for hours at a time, giving no other threads any attention.

The upside is that self-promotion is totally okay. No one gives you shit for posting an article you wrote.

Reddit

I don't personally spend too much time on /r/programming, but I do spend a ton of time on /r/webdev. The issue with Reddit is RULES. There are tons of rules, there are ruthless mods, and often, good content gets buried while terrible content makes it to the top. There's an inherent mistrust in the system.

With that said, I found it more likely to get an answer to a question on Reddit than on here. And I found it more likely that people would discuss something I post. Basically, Reddit feels like there is more small-user generated content rather than big journalism taking over. For example, check the top links for HN, how many of those come from big newspapers/online magazines that everyone knows? Now check Reddit, how about that ratio instead?

Basically, I feel like Reddit is more about users generating discussion and content while HN is more about users responding to a discussion or content. If that makes sense.

I use both, obviously.

In my experience, Reddit somewhat encourages snark and sarcasm, but you better be bleeding edge and perfect in your wit, lest you be criticized into reddit hell. Hacker news does a pretty good job of squashing most snark, sarcasm and humor which gives it a clarity of focus toward helpful discussion.

I think that this generally makes HN a much more pleasant, if slightly sterile place to hang out. In my opinion, that is a worthy trade off. I think the main critique I have of HN is that sometimes comments that are critical, but not necessarily mean get downvoted. Its a tough problem to solve though, so I can give it a pass. Maybe I should create a biometric mood ring that attaches your mood context with a post...

Reddit doesn't really have a single dedicated subreddit that is anything like HN. It would really be a combination of /r/programming, /r/technology, /r/webdev, /r/startups, /r/entrepreneur, /r/business, and a few others. The quality of each of those varies. The content and discussions seem to degrade with popularity to the point where a lot of /r/technology is memes and "circle-jerking".

HN seems better for more real-time or up-to-date news and more serious discussion compared to /r/programming. It seems much more common for an author/developer/employee of the posted project or article to show up here in the comments and contribute to the discussion.

Maybe it is because of the more serious tone, but I find that some users here care more about showing-off or proving someone wrong than having a friendly discussion and it probably discourages some people from contributing.

I've gotten the impression (and more so recently) that astroturfing is a problem on reddit. Not so much on Hacker News.

Don't let the layout fool you, reddit is a different beast.

Reddit is a versatile tool for building any kind of community you want. However, Reddit itself is not the herald of any kind of value. Like facebook groups, multi-purpose weakens meaning.

HN was born from the core values of YCombinator. It's a tangible proof of the tribe built around hacking and entrepreneurship. Meaning and Visuals are tightly coupled. Even the language it's written on (Arc) is an integral part of the overarching theme.

I like Reddit for the smaller (particularly local) subreddits. But as a frontpage, HN is far more inviting to me. HN discussions are far more engaging and constructive; with Reddit, you're competing with whoever can copy-paste a meme the fastest. (edit: typo)

I use both, and treat them slightly differently. I'm a lot more passive with my commenting on HN.

When I do my comments tend to be better thought out, but I'll often have an opinion on something and choose to not comment for various reasons. Maybe my opinion was a bit too harsh, maybe others have a similar opinion and have already voiced it in their words, or maybe I realize its off topic.

IMO this is both a good thing and a bad thing. Sometimes I find myself not commenting when I could truly contribute to the discussion. On the flip side, there's also a lot less noise when trying to filter through the discussions.

My activity on Reddit has always been extremely minimal -- I have found the toxicity of interactions between peers to run rampant in most situations. I've only been an audience member in such situations (i.e., I was not involved in generating said situation, they are situations I've happened across -- often too late to make a difference).

The disheartening part, to me, was that certain individuals participating in /r/learnprogramming tended to be outright aggressive towards individuals who had legitimate questions -- questions I had myself when first learning to program.

While reddit seems to be the breeding ground for hate groups and public shaming, this is likely the minority (even if the minority seems rather large). I wouldn't expect to see posts on HN whose entire purpose is to generate hate speech against women speaking out against how women are currently portrayed in games or for the purpose of shaming an individual new to programming for their lack of "expert" knowledge.

/r/programming is a narrowly scoped -- it has to do with programming, whereas HN is more generalized.

Furthermore, there is a far wider variety of users on /r/programming. This increases the signal to noise ratio, and reduces opportunity for higher-quality content and comments to float to the top.

And, one cannot discuss HN and /r/programming without discussing the moderators -- they are the curators of content submitted and the comment discussions, after all. I would haphazard to guess that the similarities between the two groups are more closely aligned than the user-bases themselves.

As for my personal opinion -- I feel far more inclined to contribute to HN as my writing on /r/programming is more likely to be lost in the void, akin to pissing into an ocean.

I've gotten so, so much out of the archives in the /r/cscareerquestions. It's mostly cultural stuff, but I've learned a lot from there and /r/sysadmin.

When I went to Reddit without logging in (and saw the content of the standard subreddits), I was SHOCKED at how stupid it was. I frequent a bunch of smaller, focused subreddits and really enjoy it... most of the time. I have to say, I've never been scared to voice an opinion on HN like I have been on Reddit. This is a much more civil place, especially when I'm wrong about something.

> Am I right to irrationally dislike reddit?

I'd say that you are wrong to irrationally like/dislike anything.

Hacker news today looks like /r/programming 6 years ago.

As the population of any online site grows, you get the least common denominator. The smaller subreddits are still good, but /r/programming got too big.

Biggest differences I notice is Reddit not only tolerates but it rewards jokes / puns / non-seriousness but on HN it's really hard to avoid being downvoted when telling a joke. Beyond that I don't think there is much difference; there is a hive-mind in HN just like reddit (and like any social experience; it's human nature so impossible to avoid).

One thing I will say is on HN, after like 3 or 4 comments within 10 minutes I usually can't post another comment again for another 30+ minutes (I've never been able to quantify the amount of comments required to trigger the throttle and how long it lasts). So it's really difficult to have any type of quick, back and forth conversations / discussions on HN but on Reddit, even though they have a throttle, it's no where near as aggressive so it's more possible there. I'm not sure the HN throttle is necessarily bad but I know I don't enjoy its aggressiveness.

Personally for me I do HN at work and Reddit at home.

I "extensively monitor" both channels and find that they have their own advantages and disadvantages.

When an important technology is announced, or there's some important tech event, I really want to see what HN says first. It's more likely to be a focused and civil discussion due to the way it's moderated, and it's extremely likely that an engineer involved in the project or its history will come and personally contribute to the discussion. When I read a huge HN thread on an important topic, I feel like I'm largely educated about what experienced thinkers and specialists on the topic would say.

That said, Reddit has more breadth. There's not just /r/programming, there's subreddits for every specific language, technology, and specialty. Some are better curated and moderated than others but it's a deeper and richer set of information. There might occasionally be a story about OpenBSD around here, but reddit has http://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd.

I probably follow HN more closely, but I do like to see what bubbles up in specific subreddits as well.