Ask HN: Do you know HN-like sites outside IT?
E.g. for wood- or metalworking.
What you're really looking for is a forum. A bulletin board, to use the outdated parlance.
They still exist, although there is still a lot of hand-wringing over whether forums are "dying" or not.
Long form journalism won't go away, long form discussion won't go away either.
My understanding has been that forums aren't dead -- the centralized, fast-food version of the forum, reddit has just won out for the usual reasons.
What sets HN apart is it's moderation/curation. It feels like the HN hivemind is still smarter than me so I learn a bunch when I'm here, and people try to argue in good faith so that's good too. Creating and maintaining such an atmosphere (and getting your users to reinforce it) is hard.
People come to sites through a shared interest, so frankly, I wouldn't want to discuss economics and politics on Bodybuilding.com message boards. Nor would I want to discuss say, design, on a politics forum.