Less than it would with other people. I get a lot of info about which forums exist from referring urls. That was how I learned about both Delicious and StumbleUpon. So I can at least say with fair certainty that there's no good smaller forum where people link to my stuff. Except here of course.

Metafilter might count as an exception. They often have interestesting links. But reading the comments is like eavesdropping on a bunch of freshmen at Oberlin.

TechMeme is not bad, but I don't think the sites they link to are decided by user votes.

Presumably the internet is big enough that there is a small community with no overlap with your essays. Hard to find if they are small.

I'm sure there are thousands, for everything from hydroponic gardening to fursuits. I wasn't saying there aren't good small communities, just that there aren't any except News.YC in the subset of the world that reads the kind of thing I write.