[Throwawayh89]

Why do you think spending time on HN is better than Reddit?

Serious question, because I’m not sure I understand. Hope it doesn’t come off as antagonistic. I too wonder if the negative things Reddit does to me outweigh the positive, but never considered it was unique to Reddit rather than being true about all anonymous online communities.

[Pathogen-David]

For me it's primarily the amount of time spent.

Hacker News has much less content and less content diversity. I very rarely go beyond the first page of HN, and only like a quarter of the posts at most are something that I'm interested in enough to actually spend time looking at.

The velocity of HN is also much lower than Reddit. If I check the front page again an hour from now it'll be mostly the same set of posts.

It also helps that comment sections here are smaller and that HN doesn't have pictures or other easily-bingeable content.

HN is also less likely to get me worked up over nothing. Partially because the comment section is more mature, partially because the community doesn't regularly discuss topics that get me worked up.

Edit: Another thing that came to mind: If I do accidentally visit HN too often, seeing nothing new on the front page make me realize I'm checking it too often and helps me realize I need to focus better or seek out something more productive to do.

[Throwawayh89]

Thanks for sharing. Makes sense and I can relate to many of the things you say about Reddit (too bad it’s so hard to do things in moderation these days).