With the downfall of Reddit, the best thing to do might be to beg the powers that be to opensource HN (is it already open source?) with all of the anti-abuse and moderating considerations gutted out.
Reddit itself is basically a syndicator of what used to be old forums.
Probably be pretty trivial to self host something for devops.
There’s https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters, which can be forked into an r/$sub replacement.