I must admit I'm nauseated by the number of references to reddit on HN. I think reddit is powerful and fills a void, but the few times I've visited > cmnd+w. Twitter is also useful on occasion, but simply not my "cup of tea." These sites feel like eternal September, and make me consider suicide (not to over-dramatize...).
I think to a certain extent 3 or 4 years ago Reddit was very much like HN is now. When I first joined Reddit (2007) there was generally a lot of reasoned discussion, and the submissions were very much programmer orientated in a way that's long since passed.
I'd imagine (although I suppose I have no real evidence for this) that the people who talk about Reddit and HN in the same context were active on Reddit a few years ago.
A lot of us discovered reddit when Paul Graham mentioned it in an essay.
It was pretty cool in the beginning, but then it started tending towards Ron Paul, and various political stories rather than stuff that was actually interesting. And thus, HN...
Ron Paul is still ok. I can tolerate lolcats even. It's the deterioration of comments to youtube level that puts me off.Or just downvotes without explanation. I neither want to read nor write on reddit these days... and I signed up on reddit when Paul Graham mentioned it, 6 years ago.
It's nice to get confirmation! I did once get a lot of comment upvotes lambasting the poor quality of comments on the science reddit, but frankly I think the sheer size of the reddit community will make it very, very hard to return to how it was. The culture that seems to be pushed by a subset of (mostly non-technical) reddit users is largely incompatible with the culture that I (and I assume others) are looking for in a social news site.
There are of course some areas of reddit which maintain a largely engaged user base willing to make in depth and interesting comments, but they tend to be rare, hard to find and often suffer from the mainstream reddit culture being dragged in by more casual visitors.
Perhaps we have to simply resign ourselves to a migration between social news platforms every few years.
Personally, I will never use reddit, no matter the subreddits, or whatever. Usenet and IRC are new again; killfiles and /ignore are powerful, and user-focused.
