[dangus]

I could make a car with wooden wheels too but since we have synthetic rubber it makes sense to use the best tool for the job.

Basic functionality that users expect from social media needs JavaScript. Endless scrolling is a simple example. Adding a comment reply or liking a post without reloading the page is another one.

[hagbard_c]

A car with wooden wheels - as in the type used by Babylonians, not even the iron-rimmed wheels used by the Romans - would be suboptimal and not at all comparable to one running on rubber tyres. A site which does not depend on Javascript is not suboptimal, it is a local optimum which works best for many applications. Endless scrolling is a good example of how adding Javascript to a page can push it away from the local optimum which uses paging. While there are some areas where Javascript can be used to add actually useful features there are far more areas where adding Javascript makes the site less useable, more annoying, less responsive, less reliable and much heavier. That bit about using it to add comments without reloading the page is an interesting one since we're having a conversation on a Javascript-free social media site which reloads the page after every comment. It works just fine, doesn't it?

[dangus]

Is Craigslist unresponsive or heavy? It's using JS.

HN is a wonderful place but it’s a niche industry-only forum. The barebones nature of it works fine for the people here but products like Mastodon are attempting to be a much more broadly adopted general purpose product.