[ho4]

I would say this site user design wise is about the same as reddit, so I don't agree with any of your points. What makes it higher quality is that it has a niche theme (hackery) and it makes it less popular. As in general online, the less popular a resource is, the higher quality communication it has. You can find the same quality of conversation in low population subreddits too, despite the aforementioned design.

[beachy]

Go and look at Reddit again. Every post has a little avatar of the poster right next to it. Some of them are quite funky and some are offensive. The text of the username is bold - bolder than the post content itself.

In HN the username is simply plain text. You can't even see it's a link without hovering.

[ho4]

It's true. But it's not what contributes to the quality of the conversation. Find a niche (non-meme) subreddit that has at best 10 posts a day and check the conversations on there. They all have flashy avatars, a modern design for their posts, etc. But the conversation is high quality at the end of the day.

[mcmoor]

That's new reddit for you. Old reddit is bland af, and some people love it for that.

[baq]

It isn’t love of old Reddit, it sucked, you needed RES to make it usable.

It’s hate of the new Reddit, plain and simple. Well deserved might I add, it embodied the new priorities of the site: number go up.

I quit Reddit cold turkey when they took Apollo away.

[vik0]

There are user flairs on old reddit too. You can see the persons karma if you hover over their username. But even if that wasn't the case, Reddit (99.98% of the time) sucks, regardless of what UI you use.