Hey there, I didn’t know that about HN.
I have a similar view about design honesty and products being overly focused on modern aesthetics compared to basics, elegance, simplicity, and care.
Here is how I would tweak HN: line length of fewer than 90 characters to make it more legible; line-height around 1.45% of the font size so you can read blocks of text more smoothly; optimized font sizes; use better-made typefaces so you can have better “between-the-lines” experience and overall character; make elements better click/touch targets; less busy interface, etc. I don’t want people to notice the design much. What I want is to make the product more useful and understandable; and users to feel relaxed and joyful :)
I’ll share this observation I found in physiology: the better the function, the better the structure, and aesthetics on top of it. However, there are many kinds of “aesthetics” in the human world.
The icons are there so that one can, at a glance, recognize a post type – video, link to an article, tweet, code project, or tool.
As I mentioned previously: in the past, there were many two-line post names (prompt examples were more common), so we increased the row height. As I can see it now, there are very few two-line posts, and I’ll review the row height amount next.