A tale of two cultures
A tale of three cultures.I had been to reddit and digg many times, but have never registered and never posted.I came to hacker news years ago, jumped right in, and never looked back.Why?  We can talk about all kinds of complex criteria regarding social networking, community building, people behavior, systems behavior, etc., etc., etc., but let's not overlook the most basic thing of all: it's simple.Simple font, simple layout, threaded conversations, limited options.  Easy to read, easy to explore.  No "sub-reddits", no fancy filters, no complex algorithms begging to be gamed (well maybe).  None of the stuff that people keep asking for to make us "more like digg or reddit".It's so simple that we actually focus more on the content than anything else.  There's a lesson for all of us developers in there.