reasons why HN doesn't work as a reddit replacement:
- It has no subforums
- Almost everyone here is in IT, other topics only get discussed when they are interesting to IT people. On reddit, you can talk to historians, mathematicians, language enthusiasts, fans of your favourite series, etc.
- HN usability on mobile is... yeah
- HN is text only, that's already difficult for programming, but would make talking about e.g. mathematics really annoying, and for people who want to share art, that's even more obviously not going to work
I agree with everything except the mobile usability. Hacker News has some of the best mobile usability of the websites I am using. It is not perfect but it is way better than Reddit. Hacker News is very comfortable to read on mobile and the only thing which could be improved is the too small voting buttons.
I agree that Reddit is borderline unusable in its mobile website, and the official app is ad-ridden, but 3rd party apps (the ones they're trying to kill) are fine.
I find HN a royal pain on mobile tbh. Everything clickable is so small.
Thread with many replies, the deepest replies end up very squashed right in portrait, it's annoying to read. As is the flag/dead style but that's another matter. Obviously nothing I can't work around.
- It has no subforums
- Almost everyone here is in IT, other topics only get discussed when they are interesting to IT people. On reddit, you can talk to historians, mathematicians, language enthusiasts, fans of your favourite series, etc.
- HN usability on mobile is... yeah
- HN is text only, that's already difficult for programming, but would make talking about e.g. mathematics really annoying, and for people who want to share art, that's even more obviously not going to work
- also, I really wish you could block users