Hacker News is the only elite organization I like hanging out at!! All things aside, HN always seems to be so serious in its discussion about content, and I never get the opportunity to say how much I appreciate this place.
I agree. In fact I realized how good a community HN is when I did a Ask HN a while back. I even ended up writing an essay about it: https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4... Compared to the responses at Reddit, Quora and other places the diversity of HN is astounding.
I love HN and have been using for a really long time, but I joined Reddit relatively recently because I found HN to be rather limiting in comparison.
HN certainly can't be accused of being one-note or even two-note anymore, as it could when it first started. It's definitely been growing in diversity of stories as well as users, but it's still mostly about technology and startups. There are certainly articles about all sorts of topics discussed here, but those discussions tend to be relatively short-lived (maybe one or two days max) and then HN moves on to something else.
Compare that to a subreddit like /r/bodyweightfitness[1], where it's basically non-stop talk about the subject day after day after day, and the discussions tend to be pretty high quality ones (certainly at HN level, on this particular subject). HN might see a post about fitness ever now and then, but, again, the discussion will die in one or two days, and the subject does not get explored in anywhere near as much depth as on that subreddit.
That's just one subreddit, and there are thousands more, on virtually every conceivable subject. Not all of them are of high quality, the reddit front page and enormously popular subreddits tend to be garbage, and the overwhelming majority of subreddits are dead, but there are certainly enough quality subreddits to keep my interest and even to entice me from HN.
HN does scratch some itches for me, but not nearly as many as Reddit does. That said, I'm not ditching HN for Reddit, but I am always looking out for other communities with high quality discussions on the subjects I'm interested in.
Apart from Reddit, there are also many specialty forums that have really high quality discussions on their specific subject. For example, the Muffwiggler forum[2], which is a huge forum dedicated to modular synthesizers. Everything conceivable in relation to synths is discussed there, with many subforums on specific manufacturers and subject. It's really active, and the discussions there are super informative. You're just not going to find that kind of depth on HN, or even a synth-specific subreddit.
There are many other great forums out there, too. This is far from a rare example. You do have to search them out, but they are plenty of them out there, on all sorts of subjects. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that HN quality discussion is actually not that rare. You just have to dig below the garbage surface of the internet and it's there.