Ask HN: My friend accused me of bad design and ripping off Reddit

Six months ago I started working on a side project to build a todo app. Over time I ended up going in a completely different direction and created zipcode based social platform. I have couple of things I wanted to complain to the world about in my area, 1 was how terrible the intersection of 14 Mile and Crooks is (ever run a red light making a left turn?), 2 how did Hall road and Mound road become so bad in their own ways. (If you're form Detroit area you'd know what I'm on about). Yea I got a few things I want to talk about in my area and I want others to have ability to join a local discussion.

I've been regularly sharing my progress with some close friends, and today I got the harshest criticism to date: My UI sucks, I ripped off reddit. But I really believe in reddit design of a post and tree style comments, it's a system that works and I'm just using it in my project. So overall feedback breakdown is 10% positive 70% neutral 20% negative. Most of the feedback is related to UI, so I'll leave some screenshots below.

I'm not good with UI design and I can't even justify buying fontawsome pro icon pack at this time. Yes, my choices of icons are dull at best and I understand that.

I was primarily focusing on functionality over looks, and making sure the UI is not tied up with business logic so it can be swapped later for better UI.

Is my current design so bad I should pull the plug on releasing until I come up with better UI? I was ready to release in about a week, not sure what to do now.

Login screen: https://i.imgur.com/P1zF3Mc.png Front page: https://i.imgur.com/31Q8RfQ.png New post: https://i.imgur.com/TMCoSHR.png Specific zip: https://i.imgur.com/pdRUo8y.png Comments: https://i.imgur.com/3eemeZZ.png

Sorry I can't post a link at this time I know you all would rather look at a live site instead of screenshots.