HN looks lightly moderated but there is a reason why the front page is not full of the latest and greatest political flamewar stuff like all the other media sites.

Never had a comment deleted on HN and only one submission flagged (link to a scientific study on p** sizes). At reddit, I had hundreds of comments deleted simply for stating the facts. It got worse, now I am shadow banned very quickly after creating a new account and posting a couple of comments. So just reading it using redlib now, wonder how long redlib lasts after those AI deals.

HN makes it look casual but it has a very active and diligent moderation and a whole automated system to detect spams, self promotion, hateful comments...

The basic design is on purpose, but the backend doesn't match the front.

It really can work both ways. r/askscience is notoriously heavy handed and an incredible sub.

Hacker News is one of the most aggressively moderated forums on the web, what are you talking about?

i think the overton window is quite large for ideas you can discuss on hn unlike reddit. you can go anywhere really but if your bot-ing or selling something you get swatted. also overtly political takes get nuked but it's both sides

You can't even make a joke on HN without an entire subthread being created to chastise you for it. Most political stories get flagged by default because they tend to degenerate into flamewars, to say nothing of any subject even tangentially related to race, gender, religion, physics or medicine, when the bigots and cranks come out of their crawlspaces. And plenty of people flag any non "technical" subject because they believe (erroneously) that HN is only for programming, CS and startups.

And God forbid javascript runs on the site hosting TFA, or it's behind a paywall, or it has too much whitespace or uses the wrong font or margins or there's a typo. Because if so, that is now the entire topic of conversation.

Compared to the entirety of Reddit, including all of the topic-specific, well moderated subs? Hacker News is unfortunately a dismal place to discuss most topics.

FWIW I agree with almost everything you said, but I think there's a few things that HN has that Reddit doesn't. Reddit's larger American user base tends to dominate most subs with American perspectives but HN seems to have a decently large EU population, especially during EU daytime. Reddit also has a pretty strong anti-capitalist bias in most medium sized subreddits that HN doesn't have, and I perceive that Reddit's average user age is in university while HN's average user age is probably approaching middle age (which probably contributes to the political differences.) I generally think your criticism is spot on.