Very sad to see all the 'HN competitors' (lobsters, hackful, lamernews) are all essentially dead (at least extremely dormant).

To me, all they needed were a small handful of dedicated posters/commenters (and to be open, i'm looking at you lobste.rs) to start to catch on; i'm very much reminded of the story of the reddit founders sockpuppeting to make the site not look like a ghost town; this kind of 'forced' activity doesn't seem to be necessary for long until the site would take on it's own life.