One thing that bugs me about nearly every Ghost theme is the emphasis on subscribing/signing up/begging that goes on. I don't care if people subscribe here, so I don't need all that, but I want them to be able to.

I modified the theme I'd been using by gutting most of the subscription stuff. There's no more giant and distracting "Member Discussion", "Start the Conversation" section. It's hidden behind a "Post a comment" or "Load comments" button (depending on whether there are comments or not). There's a tiny "Sign up" link in the footer.

To me, this makes the individual post pages less cluttered and calm. I even shrunk the "Reply by email" link so it sort of fades back out of the way.

This means I still have member comments and newsletter signups, but they're not screaming at you.