3-4 years ago Reddit cared about news, even prided themselves on being among the first to cover a breaking story. Now it's all about who can make the most pandering, mediocre jokes about any given topic.
HN is what reddit was 4-5 years ago. Full of technologists and also people who are outside the political mainstream (libertarian leaning). Also older.
Reddit is the body politic of the future. Lots of 19 year olds who assumed the NSA could see everything and don't have much in the way of privacy expectations.
You remember a different reddit than I do. Before /r/politics, reddit's front page would be covered with the most sensational partisan nonsense. I kid you not, the day after some hippies in a little Vermont town voted to impeach President Bush, there were at least half a dozen stories about it that got absurdly high up.
I don't agree with how you have portrayed this as a matter of 19-year-old immaturity. Every sentient adult who saw what was happening in the early 2000s and yet assumed the NSA would not have access to (say) call records was being naive. People who assumed they would have access to call records have seen that assumption vindicated. Internet companies suffer major compromises on such a regular basis that it is pretty foolish to have 'privacy expectations' about your use of the internet, even if the NSA did not exist at all.
