I chat about esoteric languages on the Godot engine discord server once in a while.

HN excels as a general purpose forum for technical discussions relating to computer science.

The biggest difference is HN is strongly anti-humor, primarily because of the weird pathology the culture here has about Reddit and appearing "mainstream." But the lack of memes here doesn't make the rest of the content better, rather it tends to result in aggression, knee-jerk contrarianism and overconfident assertions in ignorance becoming low effort virtue signals instead.

I'm never surprised anymore by how much productive discussion is entombed in Discord servers, just sad. Servers are hidden from the public, not web-searchable, barely searchable internally, horrible threading, notification hell, proprietary software, zero data ownership - it could hardly be a worse public discussion forum if it tried. Which makes sense because it was designed to be something else. Sigh... got a link to any of these servers that have better discussion than HN?

I’ll edit this comment with some links when I get back to my pc if I remember