[noahtallen]

I think there are a lot of huge misconceptions about modern web dev in posts like these. The part of the internet that’s trash is pretty much anything related to ad tech (and therefore tracking). But this is also what funds basically the entire web. Probably the best thing about the web is how accessible it is — you can use it for free if you can find an internet connection. Plus, its inherit flexibility makes it a very powerful platform. These together make it incredibly popular, but also make it ripe for abuse, and make advertisements a requirement as long as people don’t want to pay.

But the takeaway from these posts seems to be “JavaScript is bad.” This completely misses the point — anyone with, say, a recipe site strewn with ads and newsletter popups is doing so for the money. If people were willing to pay for recipes online, maybe things would be different. But the core economic model of most websites is to use ads to let it be free. You can’t change the UX around these types of sites without changing the economics. (Though some, like Brave, have tried.)

Media companies can and do build minimal feeds (lite.cnn.com), but they’d never allow that to be the default since it doesn’t make any money.

IMO, these conversations need to talk less about the tech (which isn’t super relevant — you can make plain HTML shitty too with enough ads), and more about the economics of the internet.

And if we’re talking about niche hobby and personal sites, people just use whatever tool they want because they’re experimenting and having fun. Being fast and efficient isn’t always the goal for someone playing around in their free time.

[waboremo]

That's a great summary: economics of the internet.

Until we start discussing that, we're just going round and round with micro-optimizations while the elephant in the room continues swinging around.