"Modern" can refer to more things than just "pretty" web design. If you reject things based purely on visual impression (especially technical communities), you'd miss out on lots of great things, Hacker News being a very relevant example :)

Why they call it "modern" is outlined in the very first paragraph:

> Originally started in 2006, inspired by the now defunct SearchIRC [...] Our goal is to bring awareness to IRC, help modernize the IRC platform and prove that IRC is not dead

The de-facto leading IRC indexing site is netsplit.de

Compared to that, IRC driven looks more modern.

Is it because it's lacking huge empty spaces (looks like HN)?