I feel this, and for better or worse, I think its going to wind up resulting in / encouraging "human islands" on the internet, where a valid government ID verification, combined with a video call verification of some kind, will be required to participate in these communities. Anti-clanker communities. Its unfortunate that we may in some ways need to give up our privacy to avoid this stuff.
That last one always gets me... Cant believe its been that way for so long, considering the type of people who visit this site....
There's "not having time to work on it" and then theres "complete abandonment."
I do sort of agree with OP that at least adding a few more people onto a team would be good, if not full on opensourcing it.
But hey, Reddit is always open source. And someone could always open their own site out of its source code and try to one-up HackerNews. Competition breads innovation.