The OP is going on the quality of discussion rather than the platform itself.

Reddit has always required self-curation even before they went full dark-pattern.

I like what I see when I point my RSS reader at it.

I disagree. Reddit is great if you want to read one of the 6 accepted opinions on a given subreddit. For anything else, it's the downvote arrow or subreddit permaban.

Are you implying it's not the same here? There are countless comments and posts that gets flagged almost instantly because it goes against the hivemind here. And no not because they are low quality or they miss the mark on some imaginary quality test.

I read HN through RSS and if you catch up say 1 or 2 days later you can see a lot of flagged or even straight up removed posts with a lot of comments and points too which means some people would actually find the content interesting or HN-worthy.

That’s a real problem. I consider myself a leftist and thought HN was too libertarian in 2010 but that it’s gotten more balanced since then. I used to be involved with proggit and thought they were a bunch of communists who could not stand it that you were interested in the business end of things or at all into programming for the money.

Anybody else could find subreddits that they think cringeworthy, a barren wasteland, or worse.

(As for my politics I seem to be the leftmost in a right leaning batch or the rightmost in a left leaning batch.)