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Comment by zzleeper | Hacker News Reader

I always thought it was the opposite. That subreddits allowed the community to expand without catering to the lowest common denominator, and reddit would have fallen off the cliff faster without those.

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In my view Reddit and Twitter occupy the same rung with respect to discourse. There’s a lot of variation between the subreddits and between the various pockets of Twitter, but on average the lowest common denominator is not an inaccurate characterization of those communities.

I think that Reddit is a degree better than Twitter: it's still possible to find long, substantive discussions on Reddit, but the artificial length constraint on Twitter really pushes all users toward pithy "burns" and other toxic forms of discourse.

As a counterpoint, Twitter "threads" are a thing and you can find a lot of good discourse on them. I don't know how I feel about the length constraint--part of me thinks that the people who for whom the constraint is a toxicity trap are going to be the same people who don't avail themselves of Reddit's lack of length constraint and thus come across as baity and otherwise toxic no matter the platform.

Similarly, I think that Reddit optimizes for groupthink even more than Twitter does. Good luck having an insightful conversation in /r/pol or /r/conservative or even some technology subreddit.

And mind, I think Twitter Inc is absolutely awful and Twitter is a societal ill. I just don't perceive a significant degree of difference between it and Reddit with respect to discourse.

I tend to agree with this. Subreddits are fantastic for hobbies and specialised interests. Unfortunately, reddit is increasingly becoming a hub for astroturfing at the same time as search results become more unreliable.

There are still subreddits with much better discussion than happens here. Narrow focus and consistent moderation are the keys.

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