HN is a much much much simpler website, and has orders of magnitude less traffic. From what I heard, Reddit is on a pretty tight budget, and it's a pretty small team as well.
We don't measure complexity for complexity sake, we look at the functionality offered. The fact that HN is a much much much simpler website while doing much of the same functionality is an indictment of the complexity of the Reddit mobile site. Traffic doesn't really enter into it, that is really not the limiting factor here.
They just spent the past year relaunching "reddit - the startup" so their team is now plenty big, they just don't have much to show for it.
That's just not true. Reddit has a ton of extra functionality, including creation of subs, subscription to subs, controls of voting rules, user bots that run on reddit's servers (example: RemindMe), theming, tons of settings even for the regular users, moderators/admins interfaces, apps (example: ChangeTip), reply notifications, self-serving ad management system, image/video embeds.
I'm sure there's a lot more, these are just the obvious features that HN doesn't have.
> user bots that run on reddit's servers (example: RemindMe),
RemindMeBot runs on its creator's own server and communicates through reddit's API as if it were a regular user. AutoModerator is the only bot I know of that runs on reddit's servers.
As far as i know hackernews has no concept of "subreddits", it is a subreddit, a single one. I would guess that single additional layer creates enough problems that they don't 'have the same functionality'.
