Actually, I feel just the same way about HN. You have to spend a lot of time on HN to follow the development of conversations and have to get in early to accumulate karma. I'm happy with HN as a somewhat glorified newsfeed with interesting topical commentary from coders but as a place to actually engage with people the pace is too fast (i.e. like a newsfeed) and the subject matter too limited in scope, at least given my interests.