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Comment by joegibbs | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure if there are publicly available stats but my first guess is that there are more users migrating from Reddit, probably because they’re not happy with the demographic shift.

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Interestingly, in my country, people seem to be also migrating from Facebook et al to Reddit. Our main local, country-specific subreddit is clearly gaining users these days. (FB has been heavily used by the entire society here.)

I haven't followed this -- what's the demographic shift of Reddit about?

Aside of that, I think somebody on HN also pointed out that it is now easier to get downvotes here, because of an emerging trend to use downvote as an indicator of disagreeing with the OP or GP. Maybe the rise in upvotes is also part of the same "paradigm shift" (which I personally wouldn't like).

It would actually be great to have a HN user-level option that hides all vote/point counts, including the ones given to your own posts. Can probably be easily done with some browser addon, though, but a HN option would be nicer.

Reddit is going for an IPO soonish and they're trying to bump up their user numbers, so they're trying to get a different audience to their core 18-35 Anglosphere white male tech workers that were probably 90% of the userbase 10-15 years ago. To do that they're boosting subs for things like celebrity gossip, the royals, things focused on regions like India or the Philippines. Have a look at the top growing subreddits and there'll be a lot of those topics, and compare what the front page looked like a year or two ago to now, it's probably 25% now vs nothing at all back then.

I shudder at that revelation. HN is one of the few remaining web communities I appreciate. I'd be sad if it devolved because Redditors are deciding that HN is a form of "Reddit Lite."

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