You got me there, but I am not sure it matters. Like hacker news, Google and craigslist (and to some extent the other two) make their money from having a large number of users who don't directly pay anything for the service. Are you arguing that if hacker news were somehow monetizing it's traffic people would no longer be willing to tolerate the design?

In other words, do you think a free service that was created recently and isn't especially pretty can be successful, but if the site is generating revenue from those users the design becomes problematic?

(btw I think ebay is the only truly ugly site in that article, and I think hn looks just fine).