Comment by woojoo666

Speaking from a US perspective

1. The US also had information dense fliers / magazines / newspapers back in the day. The point is that the US moved away (at least in web design), while Japan didn't

2. Hard to comment on "competence", though I guess I'd like to see a minimalist redesign of a japanese website and see a survey on which one Japanese people prefer

3. Hacker News is extremely niche. And as much as HN people hate Reddit's new modern design, Reddit has orders of magnitude more users than HN. I would bet the vast majority of people prefer the UI of Reddit over HN