It's still one of the rare places where public discussion is happening. There is simply no alternative.

dpoloncsak a day ago | parent | next [-]

Is this entire site not an alternative to a sub-reddit?

Discussion is much more focused here and not that much actually occurs. E.g. try following https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments and most of the time it's not difficult to read through every single comment being made. If what you're looking for is well discussed on HN regularly though then it's great.

	▲	dpoloncsak 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		...like a sub-reddit

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bad_username 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The public discussion on Reddit is very heavily censored and probably already dominated by bots at this point.

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aleqs 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Reddit is like 98% bots and 2% mods at this point