Basically I wanted to know what are the sites you visit which are like reddit?(or hn for that matter, although hn serves a niche crowd). Are there any?
It depends how you view reddit. If you want jokes, try Fark or Digg. If you want more technical news, try Slashdot, in addition to HN. If you want a ton of memes, try 4chan.<p>But those aren't all the topics discussed on Reddit. Reddit seems to be unique in that its very large community is fractured; its system of subreddits leads to niche topics being covered better than they would be on other sites. You don't have to set up an entire phpBB forum for your interest in antique nesting dolls, just go and create /r/antique_nesting_dolls . It's simple, fast, and because adding a subreddit to your frontpage is so easy, you can get a lot of eyeballs coming back to your subreddit over and over again. That's the part of reddit I don't see happening elsewhere.
<a href="http://www.somethingawful.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.somethingawful.com/</a> I don't visit it, but it is huge. Forums are massive too <a href="http://forums.somethingawful.com/" rel="nofollow">http://forums.somethingawful.com/</a> Amazing what's out there when you look beyond the echo chamber.
Digg comes to mind as a watered-down competitor, though I stopped using Digg altogether after the #DiggRevolt and subsequent exodus of their user-base.