1) Release Early, Release Often. I am certain the programmer who wrote it is a better, more intelligent, more competent programmer than I. IMHO there are so many irritations with this software because it was released prematurely. Even Paul Graham says it is bare-bones. Yet people keep coming back. In spite of it. It's because of the benefit of chatting at a high quality watering hole for entrepreneur elephants.
2) The UI is very different from the traditional newsgroup interface. If you are making people do things differently, then the benefit should be extraordinary (Weinberger?). I am realizing this for myself. (See http://juwo-works.blogspot.com/2007/03/i-need-your-advice-startup-failing.html)
3) Did they have to write this from scratch - was it the right strategy. Couldnt they have built on top of some open source newsgroup code?