The problem on Reddit is the problem of all social media. HN is better simply because it is too small to be targeted by the bigger more well funded PR campaigns.

Also, it probably helps that this community is not particularly demographically diverse compared to the average. There is less value to a PR company in sockpuppeting here, unless they are specifically trying to reach tech workers specifically.

The problem on reddit isn't the fact that they're succumbing to PR campaigns. The problem with reddit is that they have by far the worst monetization strategy. Facebook probably has the best. So reddit runs this site, making basically no money. Then people act surprised when someone comes along and goes "Oh, I can totally monetize this". As a result the monetization is happening covertly. This means all the incentives are mis-aligned - because the people making money from the site aren't the same people who are running the site. Should moderators be vetted? Probably. In fact they are on the most controversial sub-reddits. Are they vetted? Well not as a general rule, because that would cost money, and the people doing the vetting aren't making any money.

The perfect example of this was /r/wallstreetbets. Its sole purpose was to funnel money into some weird crypto trading company simply because one of the moderators decided on it.

There is certainty propaganda and marketing hitting HN. It just doesn't have the number of eyeballs that reddit has, so the effort is lower.

Marketing tech startups is (almost) an official purpose for Hacker News. I don't mind, as long as it's still largely community driven.

The problem occurs to any community as it grows in popularity.

The voting/modding mechanics here on HN are not immune to the poison of becoming popular.

One day there was a post there about free 5 bucks for some PlayStation stuff. The post received 30k comments. Thats all you need to know about the reddit audience.

What would improve the content quality is a requirement to maintain membership by answering a complex enough question once a month. Questions could be prepared by mods. But then all the reddit audience would be gone, and with them the reddit's power to influence the lazy internet crowd.

Reddit corporate really wants a high valuation, and they have devoted everything to growth. They don't care if the website devolves into the comments section of YouTube. Growth and money are all that matter.

They have no interest in setting up barriers or vetting members. Dumb engagement is easier than building tools to support content creation. Infinite scroll, embedded videos. It's becoming Zuckerbergian.

wait until you hear about the blockchain they just released for the fortnite subreddit. You can earn "bricks" in order to gain features like posting gifs and emotes.

While reddit's never been amazing it feels like the quality is going downhill faster than before slowly turning into youtube level comments.

They released it to both Fortnite and CryptoCurrency subs at the same time. It's called "Moons" in ths CC sub.

Apparently they are ERC-20 tokens, and in the CC sub, there are frontpage posts already asking how to buy "Moons".

TIL ceddit.com thanks

There's also removeddit.com