[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.