Combining tons of disparate web forums under a single toxic leadership is what caused these issues in the first place. I would far prefer either something federated (in the Fediverse sense) or a decent lightweight reddit alternative with no shared accounts, and thus less incentive for karma farming and voting manipulation.
Coincidentally, the forum we're commenting on right now uses a fork of the original Reddit codebase, and shares a small amount of DNA with old.reddit.com. I'd love to see something like HN for all of my favorite hobbies. But I'd also settle for a return to a healthy ecosystem of web forums. What is old is new again!
> Coincidentally, the forum we're commenting on right now uses a fork of the original Reddit codebase
The current codebase was developed from scratch - zero forking - from what I can see.
HN is written in ARC http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html which is a language designed by Paul Graham.
Here’s a thread talking about the early days of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27452276 and it mentions “The earliest version of HN I can find; 166 LOC” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723767
Here’s Paul talking about the release of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
AFAIK this is the latest public copy of the HN code, but it is significantly outdated: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc