Want to be successful? Be inconsistent

Interestingly, it looks rather nice, clean and readable (IMO) without everything else (here's a screenshot: http://joelg.cc/KJp5/o). Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that have everything else there makes a big difference. I could probably remove the ad, but a lot of the rest definitely works, I have some data on it.

Thanks for the heads up though, I think maybe my incremental changes have meant I've gone too far on all this stuff without perhaps realising.

I think you can improve things and keep the social integration, though. Right now, it's a three column layout, and the first column is basically empty. Which feels strange. If you move the left-hand icons somewhere else - to the right hand side, or to below the article, and centre the header on the content column, it will make a big difference. The fact that the header doesn't line up with the content really bugs me.

Those are the biggest things to change, but there are some smaller tweaks that would improve it too. The sub-header ("Startups, life, learning and happiness") seems very similar to the little description in the right hand column ("I'm the founder of Buffer..."); so those could be combined (keep the subtitle, and either replace it with the description text or just lose that text). Then the nav bar would come down to be level with the start of the article.

Consistency throughout a design is key. That would be the next thing to tweak for. The Join/RSS/Follow/Subscribe have slightly different callouts - they should be the same. (Or you could go a step farther and lose the callouts all together, which would probably look better.) The necessity of the big blue box explaining about the email service seems dubious ("subscribe via email" effectively says what needs to be said). However, if it stays, it would be nice if it matched the colour scheme better - yes, it's the same blue as elsewhere, but that blue isn't used in the same way anywhere else - if the background was the grey from right above it might match better. Also, just so you know, in Firefox the email field/button is too wide for the column and it's wrapping to two lines. Once we're on colour schemes, the orange of the RSS icon stands out a bit too much in contrast to everything else on the sight. For me, the email box and the RSS icon pop out even more than the header or the content when I look at the page. If all the buttons matched in colour (that silver is good), it would be great.

Also, the social stuff at the bottom of the article feels redundant.

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Anyway, I don't know what data you have on it, but I think that if people are telling you that the design is pushing them away, you should think very carefully about that. IMO, those people are more important than whatever anonymous data points, because they're clearly people who are interested and engaged. If you have to lose one or two tweets in exchange for some loyal followers, that sounds worth it to me.