You've been here since 2012 and are an active contributor. You really believe that the quality of discourse is the same as Reddit on average? Maybe you don't spend enough time on Reddit. It is literally a cesspool of humanity. Hacker News has little in common with it.
Hacker News has more in common with Reddit than you'd think. Plenty of people who post here also post there. A lot of the content that gets posts here gets posted on Reddit first. You won't believe it but there's an intersection between HN and 4chan as well. I've never seen people gas up 4chan anywhere as much as I've seen them do here.
Yes any technical subreddit averages out to the average HN thread. In some specialized subreddits like /r/AskHistorians the quality far exceeds HN because you're required to know what you're talking about to even state an opinion.
