reasons why HN doesn't work as a reddit replacement:

- It has no subforums

- Almost everyone here is in IT, other topics only get discussed when they are interesting to IT people. On reddit, you can talk to historians, mathematicians, language enthusiasts, fans of your favourite series, etc.

- HN usability on mobile is... yeah

- HN is text only, that's already difficult for programming, but would make talking about e.g. mathematics really annoying, and for people who want to share art, that's even more obviously not going to work

- also, I really wish you could block users

I agree with everything except the mobile usability. Hacker News has some of the best mobile usability of the websites I am using. It is not perfect but it is way better than Reddit. Hacker News is very comfortable to read on mobile and the only thing which could be improved is the too small voting buttons.

Thanks, zoomed in to upvote

Reddit are intentionally sabotaging the mobile Web experience to drive people to the app.

Of course, that often backfires.

HN hasn't actively sabotaged mobile. But it hasn't gone out of its way to make the experience better either.

I agree that Reddit is borderline unusable in its mobile website, and the official app is ad-ridden, but 3rd party apps (the ones they're trying to kill) are fine.

I find HN a royal pain on mobile tbh. Everything clickable is so small.

To be fair almost all websites are a pain on mobile. My smartphone is becoming more and more a messaging app and alarm clock ._.

I agree with you, and that's why I listed some missing things that would help it to be a Reddit replacement.

Regarding mobile clients, there are at least a few third party mobile clients on both Android and iPhone that work quite well.

that's a good point, maybe I should try some of the mobile clients

What’s the problem with HN mobile?

Teeny-tiny arrows.

Thread with many replies, the deepest replies end up very squashed right in portrait, it's annoying to read. As is the flag/dead style but that's another matter. Obviously nothing I can't work around.

But how would HN avoid creating its own /r/all ?

HN is /r/all.

If not in the content-mix sense, then in the sense that there is one and only one homepage, and that it's everything posted to the site.

Though in truth: there are some alternate views. "Pool", "Invited", and "Best" are subsets of submissions. You can also do a blank search on Algolia and set a time window to view the best items of the past day, week, month, year, or other arbitrary interval.

And HN would die for me.

> ability to embed pictures or videos in posts

dang does not want to have to look at CSAM.

Reddit is 100x as big as HN. I think (well, it's a pet theory at least) that internet forum dynamics change at each order of magnitude. If so, then HN can't be Reddit no matter what features we build.