It emphasizes the product name, rather than the description, which I'd argue draws the reader's eye to the wrong place; that emphasis would be better placed on what something is, which information the reader will find useful in deciding whether she cares what something is called.
Obviously we should strive for better design, but greatly exaggerating is not a useful method of critique. The original post makes it sound like this information is almost impossible to find, when it is actually the second most prominent information on the page.
I don't think it's exaggerated at all. I looked at the page for like 30 seconds, thinking to myself, "What is this? I thought it was supposed to be like Hacker News, but for products. It appears to just be a bunch of people posting half-sentences that make no sense."
Seriously, the first post is "Go Dish HotelTonight for restaurants (SF)" WTF does that even mean? It's just a string of words that make no sense at all. It's literally incomprehensible to a typical reader.
The original post may have overstated the matter somewhat, but in the responses it received, the underlying issue was clarified to the point where it is easily recognizable and can be trivially addressed by the site developers if they so choose. That being the case, I can see a reasonable amount of utility in the original post, if only in that it prompted the analysis it did.
In general, I'm not fond of seeing "now, then, let's not be too harsh, shall we?"-type fussing on HN. Welcome to the Internet! People here aren't always as nice as you'd like them to be. This does not mean the things they say, however rudely, necessarily lack value.
I'm not suggesting that criticism shouldn't be harsh. I'm just suggesting that it should be accurate. The original post gave me the impression that either the poster hadn't looked at the site or else the site's design had been updated since it was written.
It's an example of poor design; the font color and weighting draws the eye straight to the product names and away from the descriptions, which are the real meat of what the site has to offer.
Sure, it only takes a moment's squinting to figure out what's what, but requiring your would-be users to put in that effort, or indeed any effort, to figure out the most basic nature of what you have to offer, strikes me as an excellent opportunity to limit your support and public relations commitment by reducing your user base.
The memory anchor is the product name though. I go back to PH often to find products I didn't have time to check out and to jump back into discussions, and the product name is the thing I'm looking for. I can find it in seconds, and I can also see how certain products have moved up the leaderboard in seconds. Sentences as the visual lead would greatly complicate that behavior, one I think is a primary one.
Said another way, the atomic unit is product names, which I actually think is more effective than the Show HN model. Some tagging/categories would really help overall, but I think this design actually helps beyond a cursory first-glance at the homepage.
You could more or less have your cake and eat it too, if you align the site names and their descriptions in two floated columns, so it's still - fairly - possible to scan whichever column you prefer.
