Also, on the first visit I'm urged to "log in to start earning great rewards". No, thanks.

To build a Hacker News competitor you need to build a community of equal value, not some 'rewards'. The reward here comes from having intelligent people read my comments and write intelligent responses. Build that and it'll be worth checking out.

And, making it look like a pink version of Digg circa 2007 isn't enticing me at all. I do not need avatars, lots of whitespace, fancy fonts, etc. And it has precisely the horrible thing Digg had: two clicks to read a story (one click to get to same lame summary of a story, another to read it).

Hacker News is all about respecting what Shannon told us so long ago about noisy channels.