Can definitely concur about the Reddit part. Feels like commenters there are always looking for a gotcha

Still happens here, especially when people publish open source libraries. "Why should I use your library, when there's ABC that does XYZ much better?" and other variants, as if the original poster was selling something. Doesn't happen as often when people publish final projects/products (even closed source).

Maybe it's just a dev thing. Some programming languages can have some really toxic fandom :D

That is not all people say though, plenty of people are like you and will bring up dropbox etc in response to that.

The important part is that HN isn't an echochamber, you get many viewpoints here.

I believe that all platforms with voting eventually become an echochamber. Unless they are partitioned into several smaller chambers, like reddit. Here the partitioning also exists, but is invisible (only some people interact with programming posts, only some with company posts, ai stuff, politics and so on), so that gives a certain "illusion" of many viewpoints. Illusion (imho) because I don't think those viewpoints interact with each other.

I’ve had 2 blog posts hit the front page of HN and the top of popular subreddits.

The quality and type of comments were identical on both platforms.

HN specifically seemed to be commenting based on the title and other comments alone. The most common thread of discussion was clearly explained in the first paragraph.

If you don’t want this to happen, maybe stop shilling ollama when vllm exists and is better?

I mean collectively to this website, not to you in particular

I really appreciate seeing those comparisons, always learn about projects I've never heard of. And practicing an answer here is low stakes way to develop a response, that might be useful later at an in-person meeting.

My theory is that smart people have a mischievous side and get banned pretty quick by reddits insane moderators, so you're left with the middle of the road petty gotcha people.

HN mods are pretty lenient overall and really seem to only ban after numerous rule violations after giving numerous warnings.

Smart^ people don't get banned on Reddit they just get downvoted.

People come to HN comments to have a constructive debate, so they are less likely to downvote for disagreement. I often upvote comments I disagree with if the point is well made.

People come to Reddit to have their beliefs confirmed. The subreddit structure reduces mixing between users with different beliefs, and where that mixing does occur, e.g. on the large subreddits, it tends to turn into a downvote battle.

^ It's not really about intelligence but openness to new ideas. You can have one without the other.

does HN even have a downvote button?

For comments, yes, for stories, only flag but not downvote.

But both flag and downvote are karma-gated (I think the threshold is 500 for both, but I could be wrong.)

Yes, but only for comments. And it's limited not only by karma, but time: It's only available for a rather short time after a comment was posted. Dunno how long exactly, but feels like something between... 12 and 24 hours?

"HN mods are lenient". Maybe. But I've be down-karma'd so much I've had to create half a dozen new profiles just to stay above water. I'm a retired senior engineer from aerospace (so, not an ignoramus), I am very curious, I ask a lot of (what I think are) intelligent questions, and invariably I get downvoted (or whatever) for unknown reasons (since downvotes are invisible to me), So I just figure there are a pile of butt-hurt simps here, along with VERY intelligent and curious people. Weird mixture that I'm not used to. In engineering, I got along with virtually everyone. Not so much in this wild-west internet space...

I was about to make approximately the same comment. My site has been front-paged on HN multiple times, as well as in some big subreddits.

A link from HN: Usually comes with thoughtful discussion, and a detectable but temporary uptick in site donations (it's an ad-free, reader-supported project). There are always some detractors, but that's to be expected.

A link from a popular subreddit: A LOT of site traffic and server overload (once in 2015, Google Analytics showed over 6,600 concurrent visitors from /r/TodayILearned), and a lot more bile in the inbox and discussion thread. No uptick in donations.

No surprises there really, but it's useful to verify assumptions.