I disagree on openid/fbconnect. If registering logs people in, and if it's barebones email+password, it takes me as many keystrokes to register as it does to login with openid. Add in the ability to read without logging in, and I don't see the point of building openID.

OpenID is not a bad idea, but I think it's non-essential. What am I missing?

The issue is a new ID (not so much) and a new password (the big issue). The password is a show stopper for me as I am not going to re-use one of my existing passwords because I have no idea how this site secures passwords. And the last thing I want right now is a new password. It would be much better to just use OpenID/FBConnect.

I use password composer. (http://www.xs4all.nl/~jlpoutre/BoT/Javascript/PasswordCompos...)

But the point is, most people don't care about reusing passwords. Even most people on HN.

This is just another example of us techies getting distracted by things we care about. The goal is to build something people will use. Privacy just doesn't matter. (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_It_Just_Doesnt_Matter....)

Thanks for the feedback, man. I really appreciate it. I'm really not a fan of openID, however. I think it's too big of a pain in the ass for non-geeks. I'll have to look at doing something with FB connect, though. I just started noodling around their api's this past week.

And,thanks for the kudos on the design. I've been tweaking it quite a bit the past month. I've found the summaries useful as well. I have a hunch that one of the reasons that Digg has outpaced Reddit for quite some time, is that Google has more text to index with Digg's summaries, and is therefore more Google friendly and gets more organic search traffic. We'll see how that decision pans out.