[dredmorbius]

The other ironic move I'll note is that true content is increasingly getting pushed to simpler forms such as ePub readers, Instapaper, Readability, Moon+Reader, etc.

I find it very difficult to actually read long-form material in a web browser, whether desktop/laptop, or phone/tablet, with all the competing features and distractions which are presented. HN is better than most, G+ is particularly bad, other sites fall at various places along that range.

The specific mode of advertising website-based apps via pop-up interstitials is typical of what I find really, really annoying about sites (persistent header, footer, or sidebar elements in particular).

When TBL's original WWW documents were posted to HN some months back, I was particularly impressed with how readable the pages were, largely due to the bare minimalism of their markup. For actually presenting information (which was, it turns out, what he was hoping to accomplish), the original HTML markup remains surprisingly good.