There isn't a forum in the world without superiority, snark, self-importance, and toxicity; some of that is simply an artifact of communicating about contentious topics in the context-stripped medium of text messaging.

But Reddit's shitposting culture makes threads difficult to follow and powerfully impacts the culture there. On the better, closely moderated subreddits, threads are swiss-cheesed with deleted comments. It's just a very different reading experience.

Oh, man. My rate of trying to insert a non-obscure joke into a comment and a half-dozen commenters taking the exact words at face value and then pointing out their factual incorrectness is too damn high. I don't know if it's a symptom of, let's say, neurodiversity, or ESL, but humor on HN is almost universally punished. I don't think they are bots because once in a while I crack jokes in AI prompts (to amuse myself when exceptionally bored) and the LLMs always recognize them, even if they don't respond right away with a sensible chuckle GIF.