I like the design a lot (good job!), but I think you should work on the navigation. It's needlessly confusing and doesn't feel right even after one understands

I like the design a lot (good job!), but I think you should work on the navigation. It's needlessly confusing and doesn't feel right even after one understands how it works. I was about to suggest how to improve it technically (move everything into a sidebar-tree), but then realized that imho you should just scrap the hierarchical "community" concept altogether. Why not adopt a tagging approach like Quora? That way stories can belong to multiple "communities" (tags) and users can filter according to their interests. I think quora invented something very powerful here, a forum based on the same principle could very well become the next reddit.