lobste.rs is people from HN who think HN isn't nearly strict and niche enough.

All of those hacker news clones are by Hacker News people for Hacker News people, usually to implement features Hacker News never will.

Nobody outside of the HN community is holding up Hacker News as an exemplar of superior design or engineering, much less of a Lisp implementation. Anyone who's touched the Arc Lisp forum code knows how few fucks pg gave about the design of anything but the language itself. And still the original forum was so inefficient it would keel over and die under moderate traffic and internal links would time out and people's comments would just never post.