Hacker News on the other hand is based on Hackers, it's about the people. The topics are broad. When a new thing comes into existence that hackers are interested in, we don't have to move to a new place where maybe most of us don't realize it exists, we discuss it here and introduce it to others here. That's the correct view.
But the cause of the problem that reddit faces is population size. We want a small town community, not a community the size of New York City, where people are aggressive because they know they won't see that random person again. It's about seeing the same name, and treat those names with dignity. It's about caring about the people in the community.
So Hacker News in time will either deal with this problem or run into the same issue that large subreddits face. Once new users start learning behavior from other new users, there's no coming back from that. Eternal September is coming. I hope a resolution is discovered, because I really like it here.
Of course if you are interested in discussing a broad or popular topic like politics or the NBA, you will probably have to actually just find a smaller group to get higher quality discussion. There's not really a way around the inflation issue in those subreddits, as far as I can tell.
The other problem is that Reddit seems to increasingly emphasize the generic popular subreddits in its UI and how the site is marketed/presented. There are still good, active subreddits for certain hobbies and communities, but I do worry that the more Reddit is viewed as just another large social media site, the fewer such subreddits there will be.