I disagree that HN is only marginally better. on reddit, it doesn't matter how polite or substantive you are, if you step out of the groupthink you get downvoted to fuck. on HN, in my experience, as long as you're substantive and polite, even if you're genuinely egregiously wrong, you very rarely get downvoted. obviously there are other factors, like the lack of downvote for newer or low-karma users, but this is my experience