A topic silo encourages people to behave in ways that might help them reach the top of the silo. Getting to the top is expedited by pushing other people down. Even worse, it is expedited by driving out expertise.
The dynamics of HN prevent that. Topics so broad that being way outside your domain is the normal state of encountering an HN topic for everyone. Nobody has a well informed opinion about most of the items on the front page...most people don't even care about more than a handful of them even when there is a single story dominating it.
Secondly, there is no way to get to the top of HN. While karma adds up, HN is a constellation not a heap. The center is YC itself with rings of founders in the closest orbit around its mass.
Karma itself only puts you in the Oort cloud.
It reminds me of HN in the sense that it is very well moderated - it’s rare to see anyone trying to cause trouble and they get shut down quickly if they do - and most of the people seem smart and friendly. There’s quite a lot of good content (if you’re interested in music production, of course!) - it’s the only other forum type thing I use really.
It doesn’t have the same layout as HN as it uses Discourse (which is more like a traditional forum layout, but very nicely done IMO).
In theory it feels like Reddit should be the obvious answer here but it just doesn’t work for me. Too much crappy meme/joke content and/or loads of empty threads on more specialised topics. Also not a fan of the UI.
I don't think there are going to be very many places like HackerNews. "Hackers" as a subculture are bolstered by the fact that Internet based modes of communication and work (not just forums but also things like Github) are seen as interesting and productive. Plus the people capable designing such a forum are likely to be software people; it's a bit more difficult for a skilled mechanical engineer to quickly set up a forum. So it's no surprise that many of the forums are software/"hacker" oriented (e.g. Blind, Lobste.rs, HN). Any forum built by software engineers for other people seems doomed to go the way of Reddit rather than the way of HN.
However, I'll give a shoutout for a great community forum that I've participated in, and that's ChiefDelphi. But that's super niche (it's focused around the high school FIRST robotics competition).
HN is the best I've found, but is far from my goal. I found one forum that's higher quality, IMHO, but it's for a specific, narrow hobby.
forum.language-learners.org/
You won't find much discussion there (but feel free to start some). Basically, you can submit whatever you find interesting.
You want more people to want to use your favorite niche forum. But every niche forum that's gotten popular has been ruined.
Reddit has a few great subreddits. They aren't unpopular, but I also prefer not to market them. Let the people who really want it search for it, I guess.
Not niche, but it's very minimal with no JS and has nested comments.
Slashdot has your better users at the moment compared to HN. It’s probably so because who the hell tells anyone about Slashdot now days? And any of the new kids would get laughed away usually. You just have to know what you are looking for.
Rule of thumb:
Avoid any place with under 25s, they are too lame to converse with.
Posting, commenting and upvoting each cost 1 satoshi (around $0.0003, currently).