It seems like a couple of years ago the HN and LW commentariat had a lot in common, but they’ve drifted so far in opposite directions that they look more like opposing political parties today.
I mean one look at both commentary and it's clear HN has devolved considerably. Just look at the atrocious difference in intelligent reasoning in this thread's comments compared to a LessWrong post right now:
LW stayed selective as a forum, HN became the home of refugees from Reddit. HN reads more like yet-another-subreddit these days than an independent forum.
FWIW I think this is an artifact of site design more than anything else. A commentary site like HN in 2026 encourages hot takes and karma farming. All the "social media" with higher quality commentary like Substack and LessWrong center a large text blob of thought at the top and encourage reading more than writing. This puts up just enough of a barrier to write a hot take that you need to read the whole article and puts enough UI friction from leaving a throwaway angry comment that those folks will scroll away.
HN on the other hand all but encourages shallow posting. The article isn't posted, commentary is more prominent than the article itself. Leaving a comment takes 2-3 clicks and the comment editing flow excludes every other comment on the site, encouraging a write-first mentality. Ranking commentary based on upvotes offers a sweet dopamine hit over collecting karma. In 2026 these all encourage low quality engagement.
HN's UI has stayed relatively the same over the years while the Internet around it hasn't and I think its UI now acts as a low quality commentary attractor. LW changed its site design to stem the tide of low quality comments that show up here. LW comments certainly have their problems, but then, we humans all have problems :) On balance the community is much sharper and much more capable of having intellectually heavyweight, sober discussions on controversial topics. Of course nothing seems to trump my own friend network.
substack has devolved into the same thing. opening the app first thing you see if a infinite scroll of twitter like takes
and i honestly would rather have a reddit lite site like hacker news where there appears to be at least a diversity of opinion than the pseudo-intellectualization cjing occurring among the exact same sort of AI cockgobblers on LW
> and i honestly would rather have a reddit lite site like hacker news where there appears to be at least a diversity of opinion
Why? Isn't that available on literally every single other tech comment section on the Internet? Like what distinguishes these angry comments from the ones on Techcrunch or Ars or Reddit subs that tolerate AI? If I wanted mindless diversity I'd just have the LLM generate random perspectives.
It seems like a couple of years ago the HN and LW commentariat had a lot in common, but they’ve drifted so far in opposite directions that they look more like opposing political parties today.