Hacker news and lobsters pop up in these threads as answers pretty quickly but I find them to be too tech focused, not subdivided into communities, which reinforces these few focuses and make finding large amounts of related content hard. Also the lack of delineation between responses makes the discussion difficult to follow. (At least to me.)

So basically I'm looking for sites that:

• Have some sort of subdivision of their content

• Aren't very focused on any one thing

• Have some sort of thread subdivision

• Value good discussion

So does anyone have any sites?

I come from reddit and I'd like to know what is basically different in the way I should post and comment.

• Are there any private jokes or slang I should know to understand everything ? (like reddit's "/s", "FBI open up" or the verb "lurk")
• Are "mods" uncompromising ?
• Every single post I saw is intelligent. Is this required ?
• There's no downvote. Do I need to make a thoughtful comment every time I disagree ?