It's the community that makes a site like this - the tech is trivial to build.

No one on Hacker News is looking for a more modern Hacker News. This community is here explicitly because this forum is trapped like a fly in amber in its mode of 1990's era minimalist simplicity, and both it and the community remain aggressively, even spitefully, anti-modern.

We've seen tons of these "more modern Hacker News" projects and they all fail because the last thing anyone wants here is modernity.