I looked at it for a few minutes and I get no idea what the site is about or what I can do. May be a welcome page with some blurb will help.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

What I fear most finally comes true -- not even HN users can immediately figure out how to use the site (which was purposely left out from the brief)...

How about some hints like you can get all news regarding social networking websites:

  http://bit.ly/dc6ko

or compare DISQUS with Intense Debate:

  http://bit.ly/3Qhr9s

Now I definitely need to rethink the usability issue.

I was able to figure out the point of the site by finding the greyed out "about" link at the bottom. It was too much work.

Also, I think the ratings system for different products is difficult to understand. (I clicked on the anti-virus link from the about page, then on the Avast link. "objectiveness"? huh?)

Dude, it's a bit too premature for adsense, dontcha think? Also, your summary of the project is too much jargon:

"It's technically a Wiki + social networking site, and semantically a crowd-sourced review + social news site."

Put that in active tense:

"Read, edit and publish news and important stuff. Contact others and talk about stuff"

Also, entries have the URL linked to the source. You might not wanna do that. I recommend a URL from the front page should go to a summary page, where people can read and post reviews, and there should be a big button/link where they can go to the original.

Having a separate page will help you with .. err, figure that out, I'm not sure I want to go there now that I remember the adsense ;-)

This is a bit surprise to me -- I thought all HN users would have Adblock on all the time :)

In fact, the AdSense is there just to align the user expectation from day one. Anyway, I can't agree more how annoying they can be and am going to turn them off now.

Thanks for your advice on the summary.