Small enough that HN does not attract attention of PACs who have basically co opted many of the political related subs on reddit. simple email blasts each morning and alerts through the day to get people to vote on stories and boost specific posters. Can also target people to report or poison a sub

people don't understand how much of what they read on reddit is actively managed by people who want the message controlled. This is the same for any popular social media site with twitter being the top of the heap

just be glad that HN isn't that important to where the issue becomes observable (we get enough indirect political tripe as it is with submissions)

HN also isn't a space that's dedicated to politics, and when topics do come up the crowd seems mostly "free-market, free speech libertarian"-leaning (although you have a small number of Trumpists as well as socialists like me for some balance).

Even if HN were bigger, it wouldn't be worth the attention of PACs and other activists IMO, the HN crowd is not their voter base. For Republicans the tech crowd is too diverse and immigration-friendly, for Democrats... I'd bet a case of beer that many/most of the US people here vote Democrat anyway since the actions of most Republicans run completely against the needs of tech people.

Oh yeah agreed, but I think that tiny difference leads to a noticeably different outcome. The Signal-to-Noise ratio here is more than Reddit, particularly Reddit's popular subreddits. As a result I find myself changing my mind while reading comments here a lot more than I would on Reddit.

Also I think dang (and whoever else) is a good mod, which makes a lot of difference.

There's also a recency bias, I've been on Reddit for 8 years and HN for ~3. Maybe my disillusionment has yet to come.

I've had some disillusionment with HN, having been on it for 6-7 years. The dialog is mostly cordial and respectful but precisely because of that I'd come to put a lot of faith into the knowledge of the commenters. But I realized a lot of people here talk about things they have only superficial knowledge about (me included, though I've been trying to curb this behaviour) and as a result there is a lot of quackery about, well formulated, respectful quackery but quackery nonetheless. So I try to check the credentials of people when they include them in their profiles before putting too much faith into what they say.

Now I'm not trying to disavow HN, it's a really cool place and there are a lot of knowledgable people here with lifetimes of experience in complex subjects but there are also a lot of technical topics where the discourse is clearly inferior to reddit, twitter or even discord.

I've been on HN for over eight years (just noticed it, how time flies by...), no need to worry for recency bias ;)