HN not having those features is a feature in and of itself. It does one thing and does it well, not having the same features as Reddit is exactly why it's better than Reddit.
I think HN is far less accessible than Reddit. This turns away the casuals, leaving behind the more hardcore users.
Every subreddit with a large following eventually turns into a complete meme fest with low quality comments and trolls. But the smaller subreddits still offer good value.
To me the No. 1 reason HN is successful is that it doesn’t have to monetise its users.
This leads to much stronger alignment of incentives between users and the owners of the platform.
That’s not to say it’s not valuable to YC. It provides them with very good marketing to a core demographic they are trying to market to.
Kinda like sports teams run by petro states.
For social media platforms it means that HN’s existence isn’t driven by the need to grow [1], leading to a focus on quality. Hackernews does this using the HN guidelines, which are rigorously enforced.
[1] insert graphic comparing HN growth vs other social media
depends on how you want to define ad because every new apple product is going to have a post up about it. apple doesn't pay for that placement but its totally an advertisement for the product.
depends on what you mean by accessible - i assume you don't mean accessibility (for blind/disabled people), but ease of access.
HN is way more easily accessed by someone. You are not nagged by a dialog to get you to download the mobile app. HN has way less clutter in their UX (even compared to old.reddit.com). HN has fewer call to action in the UX to do things like submit, vote etc.
Compared to specialized sub reddits, HN is huge. I find the content to be generally extremely accessible. Of course, there are some specialized subjects and links to research papers few will understand. But even for those, if you ask nicely, there will be a kind soul who will try to explain.
Some subreddits managed to maintain pretty high quality in the past, with pretty aggressive moderation. eg: r/askhistorians or r/politics. No idea how the situation is nowadays, I haven't really been on there in years.
But that requires a lot of effort from the moderators.
Aggressive moderation can be very toxic. The /r/toronto and /r/askTO subreddits are modded by essentially the same people. They remove comments/posts without explanation as to what rules were broken, and then when you critique them in the comments surprise, surprise, they remove them too!
I’m 21, have been following HN since I was 18, from Asia.
HN is perfectly accessible for younger folks, if you make it more accessible for casual unserious people, you’ll start getting more and more casual and unserious conversation.
The UI is a good filter to remove folks who need hipster UI to just use a platform.
There is hipster UI, and there's not handling pagination, having buttons bordering on the unusable on mobile, commenting requiring a new page to be opened, etc.
thankfully, due to the simplicity of this site, it's easily parsable, and Daniel Wu made an iOS app which addresses some of those issues, called Octal.
I have a 11 inch tablet for HN casual reading. And I moved over to the laptop for serious discussions. My phone is for checking only because it’s always near.
I'd actually really love the ability to follow just the 'Show HN's of a particular user, for those who consistently post interesting projects. It would at least lessen the FOMO causing me to check HN a little too often.
I’d at least like to be able to choose colors for posters, and auto-collapse some. There are a few very-active posters who basically never post anything aside from confident but poorly-informed flamebait on a wide range of topics (but “HN nice” enough that they don’t get moderated for it, though their threads often get nasty). Making it easier to spot and ignore them would solve most of my problems with HN’s comment section.
[edit] and, flip-side, there are some I’d like to easily be able to spot in large threads, because they’re consistently good.
I think it's better than Reddit because it doesn't allow user moderators. That is the downfall of Reddit, as it ultimately turned it into a site where only certain viewpoints are allowed. Downvoting doesn't even matter, they just ban dissenters anymore. This is apt to happen with any user moderated site.
The other factor is that the mod(s) here are excellent and, and I rarely say this, rather neutral. No, it doesn't mean I agree with them, dang has knocked me in the head a few times over the years, but meaning I get to see both sides of arguments uncensored, so long as respectful and interesting. Really rare experience here, and I fear for the day dang leaves.
This isn’t a reasonable critique of the unpaid moderation model — the same model we’ve had since long before Reddit.
Reddit has had several notable high quality subreddits entirely because of user moderation, and is able to host niche interest communities.
I can’t think of a realistic business justification for a paid moderator to curate forums for some of my incredibly niche hobbies. These were formerly hosted on different phpBB boards, which were also moderated by unpaid volunteers. As a bonus, generally one or two of them actually had to pay to host the forum.
> I can’t think of a realistic business justification for a paid moderator to curate forums for some of my incredibly niche hobbies.
meh. I 'member the old phpBB etc. days... it was decent, but once Metasploit and Shodan entered the scene and you could buy DDoS attacks for cheap on the "darknet", the workload got so much harder for operators. Not staying up to date on patches? Your server got pwned in days if not hours - or in the worst case, you'd get someone trying out their newly discovered 0day, and there were lots of these in phpBBs code base. Some troll and/or pissed off user deciding to spend 10$ on a DDoS attack? You got yourself days of fighting cat-and-mouse to keep your server up. And that's before you got into the legally nasty stuff such as people using your board (or your server) to store warez or CSAM, and before "concerned parent" and anti-sex work troll groups made waves panicking about groomers, prostitution and drugs and got incredibly dumb regulations passed, not to mention the newest batch of anti-terror legislation requiring 24h response time throughout the year.
Moderation essentially became a full day job even for small communities and carried significant legal risk, which led many small boards to close shop because a bit of swag, events and occasional donations didn't cover the expenses by far. Reddit in contrast deals with CSAM, DMCA and DDoS stuff paid for by advertising and VC money, so unless you're a corp sub, you don't need paid mods just to keep the lights on.
> These were formerly hosted on different phpBB boards, which were also moderated by unpaid volunteers. As a bonus, generally one or two of them actually had to pay to host the forum.
Being hosted on a bunch of different boards also meant that the influx of "junk users" was waaaay lower. You had to discover it in the first place, usually by word of mouth, so organized trolls just looking for fights didn't even stumble upon them.
Subreddits in contrast? They get recommended by Reddit these days, right on the frontpage of billions of users. It's on the one side awesome for new niche subreddits, but on the other side it is an insane challenge for the mods of smaller subs to keep up. Once a sub gets recommended to users, work explodes, alone from the countless onlyfans spammers.
I didn't see good moderation anywhere on reddit. From 2012-2023, nothing close to dang and I'm being generous with my criteria for moderation. Okayish for 'free' perhaps
