I wouldn't describe the site so harshly, but a little bit of the human touch would make a big improvement.

Right now you have 40 or so links on the home page, each one leading to a sub-site with 50 sections or so, totaling ~300 links that look awfully machine-generated (scraped from RSS feeds?).

When browsing a magazine rack each cover is a little work of (usually bad) art. The title tags in an RSS feed are nothing like that -- maybe RSS feeds should be more magazine cover-like?

What do you think would help it look more legitimate? It seems to me like it would be hard to make a site like this - a collection of links - look otherwise while still keeping the simple, spare look.

Having a non-generic slogan/tagline would help. MFA sites often have a meaningless slogan on them like "when you need it, you need it".

Clearly identifying what the site is the way reddit does would also help.

Make it look like it's not autogenerated by a script. How about a link to a blog or something?

Oh I don't know, maybe abstain from having an SEO category right on the front page?

It looks really spammy, which is surprising because the site was designed by Electric Pulp, which was recommended on this forum ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134715 ).

If I stumbled across it on the net I wouldn't assume it was made by a spammer. I think form follows function beautifully.