Comment by krapp

A lot of people claim that but I've never seen evidence of the existence of a vast number of people who would be using Hacker News if only it had more bells and whistles. Craigslist is "ugly" too, and plenty of people use it.

I think it's more likely that most people (even most tech-adjacent people) simply don't know this place exists, or don't care, since no one is sharing links to Hacker News on mainstream social media and nothing goes viral here outside of already established HN-adjacent circles.