LW stayed selective as a forum, HN became the home of refugees from Reddit. HN reads more like yet-another-subreddit these days than an independent forum.
FWIW I think this is an artifact of site design more than anything else. A commentary site like HN in 2026 encourages hot takes and karma farming. All the "social media" with higher quality commentary like Substack and LessWrong center a large text blob of thought at the top and encourage reading more than writing. This puts up just enough of a barrier to write a hot take that you need to read the whole article and puts enough UI friction from leaving a throwaway angry comment that those folks will scroll away.
HN on the other hand all but encourages shallow posting. The article isn't posted, commentary is more prominent than the article itself. Leaving a comment takes 2-3 clicks and the comment editing flow excludes every other comment on the site, encouraging a write-first mentality. Ranking commentary based on upvotes offers a sweet dopamine hit over collecting karma. In 2026 these all encourage low quality engagement.
HN's UI has stayed relatively the same over the years while the Internet around it hasn't and I think its UI now acts as a low quality commentary attractor. LW changed its site design to stem the tide of low quality comments that show up here. LW comments certainly have their problems, but then, we humans all have problems :) On balance the community is much sharper and much more capable of having intellectually heavyweight, sober discussions on controversial topics. Of course nothing seems to trump my own friend network.
FWIW I think this is an artifact of site design more than anything else. A commentary site like HN in 2026 encourages hot takes and karma farming. All the "social media" with higher quality commentary like Substack and LessWrong center a large text blob of thought at the top and encourage reading more than writing. This puts up just enough of a barrier to write a hot take that you need to read the whole article and puts enough UI friction from leaving a throwaway angry comment that those folks will scroll away.
HN on the other hand all but encourages shallow posting. The article isn't posted, commentary is more prominent than the article itself. Leaving a comment takes 2-3 clicks and the comment editing flow excludes every other comment on the site, encouraging a write-first mentality. Ranking commentary based on upvotes offers a sweet dopamine hit over collecting karma. In 2026 these all encourage low quality engagement.
HN's UI has stayed relatively the same over the years while the Internet around it hasn't and I think its UI now acts as a low quality commentary attractor. LW changed its site design to stem the tide of low quality comments that show up here. LW comments certainly have their problems, but then, we humans all have problems :) On balance the community is much sharper and much more capable of having intellectually heavyweight, sober discussions on controversial topics. Of course nothing seems to trump my own friend network.