This is it - if you want humour, there are already a million places where you can get that. Reddit’s already a thing; go to the relevant subreddits there.

But if you want serious and mostly respectful discussions (people losing their cool and attacking others also gets downvoted quite harshly), you’ve got HN. You can criticise it; it definitely sometimes is just smugness or low-effort cynicism. It’s not perfect, but it sure as heck is one of the best communities I’ve ever seen.

If this place became like Reddit, it’d lose its whole raison d'être.