I like the clarity of your design, but I'm wondering whether you are disturbing the flow of the page by cutting the content into those strong boxes? The best motif for a 'river' of content is to surely:
a) Keep the flow, so your eye moves naturally down the page from post to post
b) To avoid anything which causes a 'full stop' in reading.

In your case, I would suggest that the shadowed boxes deliver a kind of interrupt in reading. Is there some way you could retain the clarity of information in the UI, while softening the divide from story to story somehow?

Actually looking at it again, I think a fair amount of it could also be due to a lack of emphasis. You have all the elements in the card at an almost equal weight, so for example the text is all the same, with only the title as bold. If you look at the original, you'll see that the ancilliary info is greyed out quite a lot, so your eye immediately focuses on the important stuff, the image and title.

Thoughts?