[toomuchtodo]

I think useless and annoying are the wrong words here. It’s elegant in that efforts to extend it beyond its purpose are self defeating. It’s a Chinese finger trap for those who would attempt to embrace and extend for adtech and corp subversion.

I love it.

[BrightGlow]

That's not really true though, myself or anyone else could fork Gemini right now and add a lot of "unwanted" features to it. The only reason nobody will follow through on that is because everyone who cares about those features is already using the web and has no reason to add them to Gemini. In that sense Gemini has skipped past the "embrace and extend" and moved itself right to "extinguish", which actually seems to be its central design.

[selfhoster11]

Not just that. Whoever uses Gemini already is likely trying to escape those unwanted features, so they have no incentive to use something that adds them in.

[thewakalix]

Avoid success, at all costs!

[zchrykng]

I'm all for making it as difficult as possible for the adtech people to get their claws into it, but, at least IMO, this is way over the line into making things worse for end users. Most sites shouldn't be multimedia extravaganza, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place for nicely designed websites.

Honestly, just the lacking of inline links makes this stuff more annoying than anything.