The level of dismissiveness I'm seeing in the comments here is really discouraging, and I'm disappointed to be a part of this community. In a community of startup founders fostering new ideas, I haven't seen such close-mindedness. I appreciate what dcurtis is trying to do, doesn't matter if I agree with it or not.
The kudos concept is different, the fact that people are writing him emails and tweets about decrementing their counts for a meaningless number is petty.
The "Elitism" invite-only being such an issue is silly. HN and reddit started with small groups of people that weren't connected to a larger social sphere, so they slowly grew organically with the content they wanted. Google does invite-only for their projects (Gmail, G+, etc) as a way to both fix issues early with minimal user impact and to scale properly. Medium did the same thing. To say the dcurtis should've made it open for everyone at the beginning is disingenuous. Curating a small community and taking feedback from them, along with having readers connected to a larger social sphere (HN) means it can grow slowly while focusing on its core users, especially as a side project.
Appreciate what others are doing, even if you don't agree with it. Don't follow the herd. Just because Medium opened its gates doesn't mean they're the end-all be-all of blogging. I made a svbtle account because I want to see how they evolve and capture what Medium is missing.