[mrob]

Full justified text exists because of tradition. It makes the text harder to read because the word spacing becomes uneven, the line ends become harder to distinguish, and more words are broken by hyphens. But it's higher status because when all books were hand-written it took more skill to produce.

Web sites have a similar popular anti-feature that's included for reasons of social status: low contrast text. I think this is popular because ability to easily read it signals both health (good eyes) and wealth (good screens).

[mdpopescu]

Huh. I always thought non-justified text existed because people are lazy; I absolutely consider fully justified text to be easier to read, not harder. Non-justified text is distracting.

[bunderbunder]

I'm sure it varies from person to person. I believe, though, the bulk of the studies have found that, while people generally find justified text to look nicer, reading speed and comprehension tend to suffer for it.

[xapata]

Same for contrast. If you're not actually trying to read, low-contrast is more appealing. Thus, the CEO who has read their marketing blurb a thousand times likes low-contrast, even though it's counter-productive.

[chiefalchemist]

> "I think this is popular because ability to easily read it signals both health (good eyes) and wealth (good screens)."

Perhaps. But I always presumed the good eyes, good screen, and lack of empathy belonged to the designer. These same site too often seem to have experiences based on an ultra-fast connection, as opposed to a wonky 4G (at best) connection.

You might be right. But I've sat in meetings and/or shared office space with low-UX-IQ designer / frontend types.

[discreteevent]

I think the low contrast thing is simply a symptom of a general trend twoards form over function, which though it may seem cool, in the end turns out to be cheap. Its the equivalent of putting dark plastic tint on your car windows. It happens in a lot of fields. The truth is most people don't know what they are doing (and we all didn't know what we were doing at one point).

[nine_k]

I don't see why is this downvoted. This is quite valid.

Fortunately extensions like Stylus allow to tweak page styles to make them more usable.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> Full justified text exists because of tradition. It makes the text harder to read because the word spacing becomes uneven

That should barely be the case with a good layout and hyphenation algorithm (or a competent printer in the old days). What word processing software does is not necessarily the best possible way to produce an even justified layout.