Great post! Sorry, but I couldn't resist this, which immediately came to front of mind (just having a little fun on a Friday afternoon)...

Ok, Hacker News regular, non-redditor here. I've got no horse in the reddit race, but I do know my Hacker News and here is the sad truth: reddit is responsible for the decline of the world-wide Hacker News community for the last (roughly) 6 years, and for the precipitous decline since 2012.

Commenting as it has been done since the widespread adoption of the reddit has been bad for Hacker News. This is mostly because the reddit has lots of posers and trolls who talk when they should listen. These newbies led to highly interventionist commenting, and copious fucking with serious community members.

The web-based interface allows the commenter to easily troll, hate, argue, and pontificate, and led to migratory community hopping. Threads are now trucked by the tens of thousands of uniques across the internet with the seasons for the community forum business (which is a bigger than the software business). The results is that viruses and on-line pests move too. The biggest community killer in the US right now is the stepfather, introduced from reddit by trollers in 2012, and spread by anonymous users to communities across the web.

The opening of the web destroys pg's carefully maintained arc application, the HN atmosphere. Posters maintain a anti-microbial discussion inside the forum, at a contant atmosphere with a complex culture. They can go into fever-mode, raising the temp to kill off trollers. The software helps maintain communication and defenses. Opening the community destroys the atmosphere. It takes the moderators days to reestablish, and is a costly expense of energy they need for debugging, troubleshooting, and scaling for eternal September. This weakens the users, compromising their karma system and leaving them susceptible to spammers and hackers.

Then there's language wars. Developers spend all season building tools so that they can survive the bubble burst. The troller comes along and takes it, then feeds the devs javascript on the server. This also weakens the infrastructure. Software is a complex, nutritious business food. Frameworks are simple, inadequate food. This is something like you farming all season and stocking up for the winter. You've canned and preserved your veg, and filled your freezer with meat, ready for the hard, unproductive winter. Then someone comes along, takes all your food, and replaces it with Twinkies. You'll survive the winter on Twinkies, but you'll be in pretty bad health come spring. (Although, like the programmers with frameworks, you'll happily eat the Twinkies, because, yum.)

In the pursuit of larger karma harvest, trollers have been artificially increasing the size if the comment thread for about 4 years, by using friends. Voting rings are thought to mean more karma. So the nicks you see today (with some exceptions) are "karma-whore" users, bigger than the community made them. Higher karma means the users are too big and the lurkers are too small (members left on their own will make different sized comments for each type of thread). This weakens the community. Some programmers bred generations on frameworks have lost their ability to create software on their own.

These weak, immuno-compromised devs are then protected by the community with fluff and drama placed in the forum to deal with the spammers and trollers that the moderators can no longer fight off. This poisons the community (yum!) and the members, and encourages resistant trolls.

Reddit is also dominated by artificial breeding of drama queens, which eliminates the Darwinian battle of the commenters which nature uses to find the strongest poster. This weakens the genetics of the members, for thousands of generations. Most, in fact almost all, web forums are industrial trolling, equivalent to factory trolling Facebook or twitter. And it has devastated the community.

There are exceptions: look into Ask HN posts (which come from legitimate users except once a day); YC related news, and anything from patio11. (taken from the surplus after he's done blogging).

A note about karma: most of the karma you get on Hacker News is not. It is sheeplike and filtered and wisdom-free, removing the extraordinary health benefits of subject matter experts, cut with antecdotes, suppositions or other non sequitors, and laced with drama and bullshit. If you want karma, make unfiltered, unheated obsevations, from a hacker you know. If you want karma and are concerned about voting rings, post when most users are present and trollers are busy at reddit. A note about Community Collapse Disorder: CCD is not a mystery, as is often reported. CCD is caused by industrial trolling and posing, which destroy real hackers' cerebral abilities, and they can't find their way back to the data. The whole "it's mysterious" thing is a lie promoted by the fluff communities, primarily reddit. But in the context of forums weakened by generations of industrial trolling, trying to forage on thousands of threads of popculture posts, having been FTP'd thousands of links from their home url, it is an easy lie to sell.