This article can be expanded to include forum software, namely phpBB. Who really needs, or more importantly, reads the list of all the active users in the forum? But the users of the phpBB software consistently leave in the unnecessary junk.
All in all, he accurately articulated a wider design laziness which can even be seen in commercial sites (opera.com vs. mozilla.com or reddit vs. news.ycombinator). I know that this parenthetical suggestion will get me modded down, but where's the line between copying a proven good idea and unwillingness to take a risk on an original design?
Blog design is a lot different than social systems design. When designing a blog you mainly have to worry about useability and aesthetics. Once you get the design of your blog just the way you like it, you never have to change it.
Whereas when you are designing a community you are trying to get maximize the quality of discussion, which is a function of both the people and the way they interact because of the systemic design. Once everyone knows what everyone else thinks the community begins to get stale, and to fix that (if seen as a problem) you need to redesign your site with the goal of either changing the mix of participants or changing the way they interact.
While news.ycombinator may visually look the same as Reddit, it changes both the people and the way they interact (through different algorithms). That is probably why I've almost completely stopped reading Reddit since this site launched, even though at first glance they seem similar.
1. "Once you get the design of your blog just the way you like it, you never have to change it."
What if the design is just usable enough as to not draw any complaints? No complaints means perfect (or good enough) design, right? But what if, in constantly improving your design, you attract an audience that passed on your site initially. How would you know if you just let the blog go flat?
2. "Once everyone knows what everyone else thinks ... you need to redesign your site ..."
If the community is such that the people only contribute trite truisms, I don't think a redesign will do much to rectify the problem. I wouldn't know, though; I've never been to a site where everyone knows what the other users are thinking.
As for point two, I suppose you never know what each individual is thinking. However, the aggregated wisdom tends to be fairly stable over time for any given topic.
For example, if the topic of Apple comes up on Digg then I pretty much know what the comments are going to say without having to click on them. If one person posts an especially insightful comment, and others recognize it as such, then chances are someone else will repost that comment in future threads about Apple. More and more people come to believe whatever is said, until someone else comes up with a new paradigm for Apple worship. So the discourse evolves, but slowly and in predictable patterns.
Certainly any given individual's opinions are constantly in flux, but what matters isn't the ideas of each individual brings to the system, but rather the range of diversity and novelty of thought present in the system as a whole.
YC news *is* pretty much a startup reddit. If the reddit people had made a startup reddit before this, we probably wouldn't have a separate YC news. As such, I wouldn't really blame it for being just like reddit.
OpenOffice is an open-sourced MS Office look-alike. Does this mean that OpenOffice v3.0 will have to copy Office 2007's "ribbon" design? OpenOffice could instead take this opportunity, a time where MS alienates its existing users with a radical design, to formulate a unique design that increases OO's market share paralleling the IE vs. Firefox browser "war."
The last line of the article, "If you start with nothing, youre forced to think about everything.", really sums-up for me one of the real benefits of a startup: you can start from scratch. There are no legacy systems to integrate, no "historical awkwardness" (well, it's that way because it's always been that way...), and no politics. You get a blank slate with a startup - every aspect can be thought about and done right (for all values of "right" that are valid at the moment the thinking is done). Time to innovate...
All in all, he accurately articulated a wider design laziness which can even be seen in commercial sites (opera.com vs. mozilla.com or reddit vs. news.ycombinator). I know that this parenthetical suggestion will get me modded down, but where's the line between copying a proven good idea and unwillingness to take a risk on an original design?