Well, what IS the site about? I read your post and went to the website and spent a good 15 seconds trying to figure out what it's about.
Easy fix is just take what's on the About page, strip it down to its bare essence and slap it on the landing page, on top of the search bar but in a way that it stands out (i.e. it should be the first thing users will read).
I agree with all your points, except for one thing that made me curious:
Why would say Reddit is an untrustworthy site, with a system that rewards untrustworthy users? I'm not a particularly active Reddit user, in fact it's been a while since I've even visited the site so I'm not taking this personally at all, but I'm genuinely interested as to why anyone would consider it an untrustworthy site that encourages untrustworthy users.
I'm assuming when they boot up (their copy of) the hard drive, it prompts for a passphrase, and if you type an incorrect one it'll tell that it's incorrect (as opposed to simply outputting garbage). That's the most common case anyway.
If that's the case, and it likely is, then that's pretty concrete proof that there IS something to decrypt.
edit: Actually, the article says that the hard drive was encrypt with Apple's FireVault, so there you go.
But to be a genius, you don't have to be the best, only one of the best.
The article also never claims that everyone IS a mathematical genius, only that they have the potential to become geniuses. Whether or not the achieve this potential in their lifetimes is another matter entirely that doesn't contradict what your quote implies (that only a small percent of the population can be among the "best" at any given time, by definition).
I can get behind that, if we defined genius to be pursued passion. Not everyone has a passion for mathematics, that is true.
I just thought what the root post was implying is that even if you're passionate, you might not have the potential to achieve genius-level skill because that would somehow be genetically predetermined. If that was what he was implying, I'd love to see some evidence to support the claim.
Any and all skills? No. Mathematical and other related intellectual skills? Why, yes, I do. Despite what most people say, I've never seen a genius who hasn't worked at least twice or thrice as hard as his peers. I've never seen a child that, without the help of any tutors at an early age, or without any influence from their parents, was simply spitting out non-trivial theorems from an early age. I have a hard time believing that some people are BORN better at math and logic than others, and I've yet to see any evidence to suggest that.
Quite on the contrary, I've seen plenty of evidence to suggest that genius is at all not genetic, and that you can train children to become prodigies, and later, geniuses. Surely you've heard of Judit Polgár, universally considered the best female chess player of all time? She was made a genius, not born. Her two sisters grown to become Grandmasters as well. And here's Dr. Frankenstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/László_Polgár
I find that most of their software is targeted towards beginner/intermediate hackers. Having to recompile /forces/ you to tinker with the source code. When I was learning how to code I would hack the shit out of my window manager (dwm), I learned a lot of C in the process. When you think about it that way, the "arbitrary limitations" on lines of code and everything else starts to make sense.
I agree most of their stuff isn't targeted toward the average user, just this small niche. Their browser, surf, doesn't even support tabs as far as I can remember.
Easy fix is just take what's on the About page, strip it down to its bare essence and slap it on the landing page, on top of the search bar but in a way that it stands out (i.e. it should be the first thing users will read).