> Everyone deserves a good sneer now and then but I come to HN because people generally look closer / think about second order effects and so on.

Wait until you encounter HN's incorrect hot-takes that get upvoted to top-comment in a niche field you have expertise or personal experience in - especially if it's in a non-tech field. I wouldn't bet on HNs superiority over Reddit, except for a very narrow band of fields. A comment doesn't have to be correct - it just needs to conform to audiences biases in a seemingly cogent way, right or wrong.

Yeah, I've seen this before. Doesn't give me a lot of confidence in the collective wisdom of hn.

That's generally true of the large/default subreddits with no community guidelines.