It’s not clear whether HN has ever approached the same level of signal as subreddits. If you visit reddit front page then surely you’re looking for comedy and chatter, but if you consider the tech subreddits I don’t think Reddit was ever outperformed, such as for the Rust subreddit. In a way HN is all front page, even if its front page is higher signal than Reddit.

You're right, but if Hacker News questioned its deeply held cultural belief in its own intellectual and technical superiority over Reddit, it would have an existential crisis.

Does it? Because lots of shitty cliche jokes regularly get upvoted and built upon even further, whereas others that are actually good get flag-killed within a short timespan. I’ve been looking for an explanation for this wild discrepancy but I’ve come to believe it’s just luck, and depends on people’s collective moods that day.

Would make for an interesting deep-dive to be sure.