I _am_ an HN user, and the landing page absolutely does matter for an MVP. The issue here is that they went to all of the trouble to make a landing page, then

I _am_ an HN user, and the landing page absolutely does matter for an MVP. The issue here is that they went to all of the trouble to make a landing page, then hid it from their users. The parent of this thread was tipped off by noticing his scrollbar, but it was worse for me -- Chrome hides the scrollbar. I opened the link, saw a barren a paywall / loginwall, closed the tab, and started to write a post questioning the decision to post a barren paywall to HN. Then I thought "wait a minute, maybe I can scroll...", and opened up the tab again. That's not the first impression they want.