What are the advantages (or differences) of these compared to HN? From a quick glance they seem to be clones with a bit of glitter.

I've been trying to get a lobste.rs invite for years! It's a tough community to get into. I hadn't heard of Tildes before, but it looks cool, too.

Reddit reached Eternal September a while ago, so the key is to find small (yet active) communities whose content doesn't make it to r/all. I moderate a cycling community there, but we're really strict about what type of content gets posted. It sucks that we as a mod team have to do that, but if we don't our community gets overrun with memes, image macros, and rage comics.

Shoot me an email - it's in my HN bio.

I've been on lobste.rs a while. It's even worse than HN.

This is an honest question so I hope it doesn't come off in the wrong light. If you don't like it here? Why do you continue to visit and interact?

Because better platforms died off years ago (or have been killed).

Which platforms did you find better than HN? And of those which were killed?

NNTP, some mailing lists and the peer-based resharing/voting in Google Reader