Some HNers believe the site is superior to Reddit, if you compare it to the smaller and high quality subs, there isn't any difference.

there's been a few times where I read something that I was really glad I found out about through here, and probably wouldn't have found out otherwise. But yeah, easily >99% of it is just passing time

HN is great for discovery but 90%+ of the comments have declined to ChatGPT levels.

For me the benefit is honestly just less content. There is only so much that makes it to the front page here and the lack of infinite scroll means I rarely see beyond it. It helps me waste a lot less time. But reddit was also a real problem for me. Way too many hours each day and I had to quit it.

I’ve discovered a bunch of neat libraries and projects through it.

HN comments are less sarcastic, cynical, info-free than Reddit comments.

They can be, but not always. For example, any subject even tangentially related to Twitter or Musk summons a spate of low-brow, boilerplate comments.

HN was my MBA back in 2010-2013, that’s where I learnt how to create a working startup. There were blogs like Kalzumeus or Joel On Software, people were still debating technical or business issues about startups.

Now it’s more a news aggregator. It’s my fault too, I don’t blog about the company I’ve created, and people can learn how to create proper startups in many places.

It varies... I'll often see mention of interesting/useful tools/sites/applications mentioned in more technical discussion. I don't always find these things immediately useful, but often even a year later if I can remember enough to search and find what I was looking for. Sometimes just knowing something exists in extremely useful.