[dredmorbius]

If that's the sort of thing you want, you might consider a site which features these.

Tildes has a curated selection of topics: <https://tildes.net>

Lobste.rs is far more similar to HN in overall dynamic ... and includes tags: <https://lobste.rs/>

HN has long held out against groups, tags, or topics in the interests of providing a single unified community (see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11843220>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716718>, and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098> for example).

HN does have an excellent site search (through Algolia) which may serve some of your interests. There are also curated collections of posts available under the "Lists" link (<https://news.ycombinator.com/lists>) including Best, Invited, and 2nd Chance, which tend to serve threads of better-than-average quality.

When using search, it's often helpful to search recent comments rather than posts as the former tend to be a larger and richer target offering more hits, as compared with the often vague and nondescriptive 80-characters of a post title itself.