There's much of reddit that is still interesting and useful, and there's plenty of good discussion to be had - it just has a much worse signal to noise ratio since its exploded in popularity. If you're willing to unsubscribe from some of the bigger subreddits and take the time to "roll-your-own" so to speak, there is a lot of value to be had.
Right, there's really nothing fundamentally different about HN and reddit other than the audience. At their core they are both vote-based commenting communities - and the generally high quality of comments makes me wish more sites (like Gawker, Engadget, etc) would use the same mechanism. Yes there is a lot of herd behavior but it's leagues better than the "First post!" cruft you see everywhere else.
Well, there are subreddits for any particular political persuasion you may have - most of them have better discussion than the general /r/politics. There's /r/programming, but its a little light on content sometimes so I prefer:
/r/systems
/r/machinelearning
/r/netsec
/r/compscipapers
/r/coding
/r/compsci
/r/linux
/r/opensource
/r/csbooks
for the hacker part of me. There are also all sorts of other ones for any interests you might have - hard sciences, soft sciences, food, photography, sports, fantasy sports anything you'd like. Heres a spreadsheet with some other subreddits - its not nearly comprehensive, but it gives you an idea of what's out there.
TrueReddit is pretty awesome: http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/ . It's explicitly for "...thought-provoking articles, reddiquette, reading before voting and the hope to generate intelligent discussion on the topics."
In addition to what others have said, I'll add r/depthhub. It's similar to r/bestof, but it serves to collect all of the interesting and deep discussions that happen on Reddit. r/theagora is also great if you have a philosophical bent. It's an attempt to recreate the dialectic of the Socratics. Emphasis is placed on focussed rhetoric and honest argument, and to avoid logical fallacies.
Have you seen the level of commentary around the 'Net? I agree that Reddit's fallen down a bit, but it's way better than any other free and generalist site on the web. Heck, it's better than most soft-specialist sites. Reddit is in the same class of website as Digg, major newspapers, and YouTube - have you been to those sites and read their comments sections? Don't, if you want to keep any faith in humanity. By contrast, Reddit is almost reasonable. It's below HackerNews/Groklaw quality, and probably even below ArsTechnica quality, but it's still above average overall, especially among non-specializing and free sites.
The key to reddit is creating an account and subscribing to the right subreddits (programming, science, compsci, ...). Equally importantly, unsubscribe from the main "reddit.com" reddit, pics, wtf, etc. Suddenly reddit becomes an informative, useful site.
Entertaining perhaps, but I thought the interview with the IBM guy was a lot more interesting. There's not much on here except personal information and jokes.
