"The goal is to have a system that is very simple to understand and modify and that is able to handle a very high load using a small virtual server, ensuring at the same time a very low latency user experience."
I don't think I prefer scalability and low-latency over a high-quality of people discussing things I care about. The focus should be on community, not handling a large number of users.
I think LamerNews was more of just some fun antirez had with Redis.
I'm pretty sure it's a fairly old (few months, at least) clone made by antirez, the creator of Redis. Obviously it didn't quite take off.
Wasn't it more a showcase, showing what can be done with some pretty dependency-free Ruby and Redis as the main (and only) datastore/caching mechanism?