Usability for me is about speed and convenience--see my rendering[0] on the opposite end of the scale--all stories for the day loaded on one long page. Click the date heading for yesterday's. It was made for reading while commuting (with intermittent internet) years ago and I just kept using it on desktop.
Here here! But you're understating it.
Less information dense, and smaller fonts is an appalling use of type, and layout. These first principals about type, font, page layout, they are about readability, and scalability...
We have 600 years of printing, of typography to lean on. Thats 600 years of refinement on line length, spacing and size. The human eye didn't evolve in the last two decades all these lessons still apply!
I'm really good with frontend, but I only have quite limited design training. I can whip out a good non-dense layout pretty quickly.
On the other hand, pretty much every (good) information-dense layouts I ever worked with had to be properly designed by a professional.
Maybe the reason for that is just fashion, I'm constantly informed by what I see and it's easier to replicate, whereas something that "breaks the rules" needs a better professional.
It looks like the vote buttons were moved to the right to so that there would not be both vote buttons and post type icons on the left side of the post title. I would argue that vote buttons are more important and should get priority. Maybe remove the post type icons and instead add tags to post title? Then you can put the vote buttons back on the left side where they belong. If you do decide to keep the post type icons, there is way too much white space inside of the circles.
I don't understand why there is a "#" in front of the usernames. Hashtags are typically used to indicate topics rather than people. Unless this is sort of callback to IRC days where operators in front of names indicate server hierarchy.
If you are going to do all-white background I would like option to switch to dark mode.
I do like the timestamps though.