To be fair though, 90% of reddit is the "reddit hivemind".

Yes, this seems to be the nature of communities both online and offline. A community becomes known for something like hipsters in Brooklyn, cat memes in Reddit, or motherhood paraphernalia in Pinterest. More people of the demographic with the same mindset join and stay, whereas everyone else feel unwelcome and gradually leave.

I left Reddit a while back because I felt this way. I'm a conservative and on that site it's like being a social pariah. I'd rather just keep my thoughts to myself from now on.

Serious question: how has this differed from HN, if at all?

The few times I've been in a political discussion on HN (which is admittedly rare), it's been a crap shoot between a reasonable but clearly left-of-center discussion and "conservatives are the most evil thing imaginable and they clearly lack any intellect."

Well here at HN they quickly steer the car back on to the track and disuade anything that isn't technical or related to "hacking". The ones that slip through I just ignore. The signal to noise ratio is much better and I feel like I can focus on tech here. Reddit is too wide open for that.

That doesn't make sense. There is no basis for making this kind of generalization. The Reddit community has only become more diverse with time, not less. You'll find more homogenuous crowds in some subreddits, but Reddit's users are very diverse in both interests, demographics and behavior.

Source?

Reddit

I didn't want to say that so I'm glad someone else did =)

I agree that it's silly, but there really are too many hipsters in Brooklyn.