What if HackerNews instances were easily deployable? Say on par with launching a new blog through WordPress or similar. Do you think that that would by and large provide the tools and interfaces to satisfy what you are looking for?
Here's a cross between HN & Reddit and some other things, which I think is ok easy to deploy (like signing up for WP.com): there SaaS hosting so one won't need to install oneself ... Otherwise it's Docker images:
https://www.talkyard.io (I'm developing it) — and if you scroll down, you'll notice it adds some improvements on HackerNews and Reddit:
