The issue is lack of identities. If you make it completely anonymous then it will turn into a troll farm. If you require full identities then it'll turn into Facebook (or something like it). Blockchains add private keys and economic incentives for maintaining identities associated with those keys but there has yet to be any actual social platform that operates in a decentralized way because most of the crypto thought leaders just hang out on Twitter and Reddit.
This is a hard problem and adding another publishing platform into the mix is unlikely to lead to any worthwhile outcomes because every variation of this has basically already been tried and they have all failed. My guess is that digital platforms are just not a good medium for generating worthwhile content. The incentives and feedback loops are not conducive for creating anything worthwhile and lasting. The more people that are added into the mix the more diffuse everything becomes until eventually the only things gaining traction are the lowest common denominators of human cognition like shower thoughts, cute animal pictures, celebrity gossip, conspiracy theories, and general pop culture.
One thing HN gets right is its focus on technology. Any other platform will have to pick some kind of similar niche and pursue it with laser focus to have any chance of producing anything worthwhile.