Nowadays I'm not sure I agree. the site is so angry in general and insults are not only common but seemingly encouraged as communtites are warring with each other. Small, niche communities can work but they fall into the same issue as the rest of forums: inactivity. on a sub with less than 10k subs you end up with barely a post a day. That sweet spot around 30-50k doesn't last too long either without either fizzling out or blowing up.

Like I had a simple reply asking someone what they think and their immediate reaction was "I'm not having this conversation with you". And then any response trying to defuse the situation that had no fuse to begin with just turned around to gaslight me with "see now we're arguing about nothing".

I can't ever imagine that happening on HackerNews. They'd at worst simply choose not to answer instead of feeling a need to get the last word in and profess how indignant it was for me to be inquiring about a user's post on a public forum. That just gets draining.

It can be, but the problem is that the good subreddits are only take one click for someone to join them, and thus they are not isolated at all from the broader community of Reddit and the broader community of Reddit being what it is that sub reddit inevitably degrades. But yes, some subreddits are nice.