HN is still relatively balanced, but I see a lot more reddit style comments. Usually 20 min on HN I find nothing really new, tons of polarizing topics, discussions are decent but ultimately pointless, I really feel like I need to take a break.

Even niche reddit communities end up being full of newbies and self promotion spam. There are exceptions (/r/steroids comes to mind back when I was into that) but programming/tech subreddits are just noise.