[chi3]

Most people will understand reddit if they give it a chance. Problem is that they're less likely to do so if they find the design and UX unintuitive.

I know I disliked reddit's design when I saw it the first time, and I've spoken to several people who never got into reddit because they disliked the design.

[disiplus]

i would say that was the feature.

[agumonkey]

there was a similar discussion in emacs land, people were afraid they'd lose users, and to me .. that was perfectly fine. Those who stick to emacs in the spite of all the seemingly looking defects are users that really like it. Distorting something for market share like mentality is not good, it lowers entry but low entry means easy exit. Not worth it IMO. (plus in emacs, case, unless some large effort, no way a newcomer, even tech saavy, won't suffer, it's just too large)

[cookiecaper]

Yes. There is a huge portion of people who will take one look at something that is mostly text, declare that it appears jumbled and/or confusing, and have any interest in doing anything with it immediately killed.

This large group of people, probably the majority, does not want to give such platforms a chance, and they do not want to get under the covers and figure it out. They simply do not want anything to do with something that is tightly-packed or primarily text-based. Many of the people I tried to recruit to reddit in the early days (either reddit.com or sites running the reddit software) had this reaction.

This can be a feature when you're trying to target specific types of people (cf. HN). But if you're trying to sell ads, it's a bug, because ad sales are all about getting as many human eyeballs on your platform as possible. Perceived ugliness is a real barrier to mass adoption.