If you have so many awesome mobile designers, maybe put one to work on your own site and create a responsive layout that works on a mobile device! This fixed width layout doesn't help prove your point.
It's valid constructive criticism. I realize that didn't come out right, but you should really work on that, it's not even all that complicated to get that page to display nicely with css mediaqueries
You are right, this comment makes me sound like an ass. Sometimes HN traffic excitement overpowers language control. Let me elaborate on the MQ point.
We do want media queries and it isn't too complicated, indeed. Like you correctly pointed out, we have some amazing designers on Scoutzie and many of them are familiar with responsive layouts. We could design a layout that looks great. More so, we could upgrade to the latest version of the Bootstrap and use their responsiveness to accomplish this goal.
Having said that, we have been been changing something on the site on at least weekly basis, tweaking the layout, occasionally flipping it on its head. With that, I track analytics and I know the percentage of users that come from mobile and I can guesstimate their behavior on the site; it's very similar to the desktop users, not better, but not worse. So, maintaining a responsive layout right now just doesn't make as much sense for us, if you consider the time tradeoff.
Furthermore, a responsive layout shouldn't just be smacked on top of the regular design. If we were to create a truly great experience on mobile, we should design it with mobile needs in mind. Just having object be smaller and wrap around is a good start, but I believe there is more to responsive design than that.
For right now, we'd rather focus on making a better overall (desktop, for now) experience, and once we got it down, we'll go ahead and revamp the responsiveness.
