I hear people say this all the time but even the “well-manicured” gardens like the neutral news subreddits suffer from the fact that Reddit as a platform is just not a proper solution for actual discussion. HN is a bit better even and only due to not showing comments karma.

It is rare (in fact I’ve never witnessed this) that I see someone on Hacker News spout paragraphs of completely inaccurate information and be rewarded with hitting the top of the page. The culture on Reddit is so bad that on more than one occasion I’ve had someone respond to me with nonsense and provide sources that don’t even mention the topic at hand. But because people see links they upvote (and once a post has a positive upvote rating inertia kicks in since people want to agree with the karma score.)

So I disagree, you can manicure rotten eggs all day and they’ll still be rotten. Reddit is rotten and it gets worse every sprint as they introduce more and more Facebook features. The problems with Reddit have only been magnified by the fact that a majority of its users today use it as an app similar to tik tok, and the company is encouraging this. Mainly because what the platform was initially designed as (a top site + forum for the whole internet) isn’t as profitable as being just another gamified and over advertised platform where people can argue about whatever the topic of the day is.

I've definitely seen this happen in a slightly different form on hacker news. For example, sometimes someone will reply to a dissenting post simply with a link to the original posters profile as if their history and karma somehow justifies not arguing with them.

I'm genuinely not sure what value the karma system adds

If every reddit user had a tag displaying their age, it would help shed light on why that site is such a joke. I suspect it's largely teenagers and young 20-somethings playing expert in a wide variety of fields.

It definitely is, the demographic seems to completely have changed from when I began using Reddit a decade ago. It use to be fairly technical in nature similar to HN. That has completely changed as even the commentary is so poor compared to just a couple years ago that I can’t believe a company would be so hostile to the user base that initially built it in favor of becoming an application the market has little need for.

There’s plenty of social media companies out there already I don’t see why Reddit decided to become a worse version of Facebook when it could have charted a different path. I’m bitter I guess, as every other social media company is realizing they need to take a step back and add ways to make discussion more civil Reddit is doing the opposite and their karma system actively helps bad faith actors due to how much it affects the perception if a given post.

I’m completely done with Reddit, the last two times I’ve reinstalled it the UI has added improvements that I don’t want and I haven’t a productive conversation there in over a year.

Culture wars topics have always existed on HN. Today it is landlord/motherboard, a few years ago it was master/main, and who can forget Donglegate?

Actually HN used to be libertarian as hell with a significant Rand contingent inherited from the Startup community. I feel that HN has mellowed politically over the years as a greater international audience has joined.