After thinking about it a bit, one of main advantages of HN and reddit is to me very good signal to noise ratio. Screenshots of Talkyard seem to repeat those "s

After thinking about it a bit, one of main advantages of HN and reddit is to me very good signal to noise ratio. Screenshots of Talkyard seem to repeat those "socia" etc icons a lot. Most message boards are ugly in this aspect: they use more vertical space for displaying irrelevant user information and avatars, instead of focusing on content. A post 'td' or 'div' is always at least as high as the left box with avatar and user info. Posts with few words become very wasteful. I think it should be the opposite: the post row height should be only as high as needed to fit post content. If the user doesn't post enough, his avatar/user info is trimmed. That should be doable with SVG avatars at least.