It's not really that small and I don't know why people say that.
Last time I saw stats, it was five million monthly visitors. It's small as a platform. It's smaller than Reddit or Facebook, but those aren't discussion communities.
There aren't huge numbers of subreddits larger than five million people and last I looked the largest tended to be about trivial BS.
Last I checked, HN is the largest serious tech discussion board on the planet.
I've gotten traffic from HN and /r/programming, and the influx from HN is larger. I think it's a function of two things. First, /r/programming is higher-volume (i.e., more front-page links per day). Second, Reddit subscriber counts are not DAU / MAU, it likely includes a ton of inactive accounts.
Funny I just looked and Reddit says r/programming is 4.1m which last I checked is less than the 5 million unique visitors HN was getting a few years ago when I last saw stats by the moderator and I don't know what it's at now.
Twitter works completely differently from most platforms and isn't a unified community.
Last time I saw stats, it was five million monthly visitors. It's small as a platform. It's smaller than Reddit or Facebook, but those aren't discussion communities.
There aren't huge numbers of subreddits larger than five million people and last I looked the largest tended to be about trivial BS.
Last I checked, HN is the largest serious tech discussion board on the planet.