Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I think Google has enough interaction data (between +1's, comments, and shares) to know what the top posts in any community are. They need to slap the volume control slider that they use on other parts of the site onto the community pages to make it easy to view the top 10, 50, or ... recent posts. Similarly, it would be nice if they allowed the cream of the crop posts from the communities to bleed through to the main page. Discoverability of communities needs a lot of work to, but that's another comment. :)

That was also my reaction. Google thinks emulating the Yahoo finance board format is a good idea? Srsly?

So far I've found that the best communities are the ones that have very good categories on the left. Being able to separate your posts like that is great.

For example, check out "3D Printing" in "Makers, hackers, artists & engineers" https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/11284500688414839186...

It's the first day.