But the subreddits for your favorite band or hobby are alive and healthy.
HN’s culture might be “preserved” but it’s not perfect. Personally, it irks me how humorless this place is. Jokes are often not allowed here.
When jokes are fully accepted they tend to be lower effort than a comment that is thoughtful, and in reddit they tend to get more upvotes than the thoughtful one. This incentives people to write low effort jokes in order to get more fake points. The tendency thus created alienates rational discussion and doesn't bring much information.
There are already places in where you can be witty instead of wise, but this is not one of them.
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.
On Reddit there is a lot of jokes, but most of them are replicas or just pure memes that gets repeated ad infinitum, nothing that really cracks me up except some rare ones. But on HN, when there is a highly upvoted comment with a joke somewhere within, it's always good one that contributes to the comments otherwise insightful points.
The problem is when everyone thinks that they have some unique insight and that their cynical one-liners are worthy to be written down. Put that together with the development of "in-groups", and you'd see most of the threads becoming sequences of re-hashed jokes. You get "ha-ha funny" posts, but you get no one really challenging anything related to the topic and you drown out those that might actually have something to add to the conversation.
Good comedy/satire works when it manages to bring new insight into a topic. If you have such talent and your comment can be insightful and humorous, I doubt you'd have trouble with the crowd.
Some of my highest-voted comments have been pure humor or satire. Here's an example (my two comments in the thread; start at the top for context):