Which is mostly the opposite of HN, which skews older and actually more educated, comment guidelines are much stricter, and the topics covered are much more technical and narrow. Even non-tech topics covered on HN (e.g., in-depth discussions of particular judicial rulings) aren't really of much interest to an average teenager or a person in general. Which leads to a few different potential effects:
a) Older and more educated people have much less reason to "flex" how smart they are. The also have fewer occurrences of delusions of grandeur/Dunning-Krueger effect.
b) Niche technical topics have a barrier to entry, which already eliminates a gigantic portion of the toxic audience. The topics themselves are also largely uninteresting to an average person.
c) Stricter comment moderation eliminates a lot of potential toxic material, like every other comment devolving into a shitty attempt at a joke or a personal attack.
And for me, personally, the biggest difference seems to be that on HN, there is a way higher prevalence of people trying to figure out what is right, instead of who is right. I am glad to be proven wrong in an argument here, because it gets me one step closer to finding the "most correct" answer. And the arguments themselves (usually) tend to be very polite. While on reddit, it seems like the vast majority (outside of some specialized and fairly niche subreddits) is just obsessed with proving that their answer is the "most correct" one, so they go all out on the means to reach that goal, which tends to any sort of arguments to become very uncivil very fast.
