Often designers put their hearts into things that look like junk to people on the outside, or otherwise are not appreciated or have practical downsides. This is particularly well documented in architecture, see
They don't mean big, they mean bad. Which obviously is subjective: In this case, I assume they mean, as I do, "bad" from the perspective of "encourages community building & social connections".
If you walk down a street in, say, Amsterdam, or down one in St Louis, it's two very different experiences - Amsterdam teeming with life, it feels close, safe and small. You can bike anywhere in 30 minutes; the layout of the city itself encourages pedestrian traffic. The marginal cost of popping into the bakery next to the wine store is 30 seconds, so the streets are lined with small mom & pop stores that care, genuinely care about how their street is doing, that the sidewalk is welcoming..
St Louis is a city replanned for cars - you do not move in St Louis but by automobile. The marginal cost of going to two stores instead of one is at least ten minutes, so you always go to Schnucks and call it a day. Biking from one point to another is a lost cause - I literally saw a woman crush the skull of a bicyclist with her SUV in St Louis just last month, he's dead now because fuck bike lanes.
And Amsterdam is three times as populous as St Louis.
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/0...
and also
https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Informati...
I think there is nothing wrong with the "design" of reddit and HN. Those designs do the job; I think in most cases the design is just a container for the content. People come to these sites because they want to enjoy the discussion, not because they want to enjoy art.
If anybody has a complaint about the design of HN, it is that they have a hard time reading it on phones with small screens.
If you're generally interested in answers to the questions you raise, you might enjoy reading Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. (https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/0...)
If you walk down a street in, say, Amsterdam, or down one in St Louis, it's two very different experiences - Amsterdam teeming with life, it feels close, safe and small. You can bike anywhere in 30 minutes; the layout of the city itself encourages pedestrian traffic. The marginal cost of popping into the bakery next to the wine store is 30 seconds, so the streets are lined with small mom & pop stores that care, genuinely care about how their street is doing, that the sidewalk is welcoming..
St Louis is a city replanned for cars - you do not move in St Louis but by automobile. The marginal cost of going to two stores instead of one is at least ten minutes, so you always go to Schnucks and call it a day. Biking from one point to another is a lost cause - I literally saw a woman crush the skull of a bicyclist with her SUV in St Louis just last month, he's dead now because fuck bike lanes.
And Amsterdam is three times as populous as St Louis.
Cannot recommend https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/0... enough for this - urban planning has a massive impact on our lives.