Why This Site Became "Simple" a Year Ago
Light is good, heavy is bad
Last week someone in my family asked why the site became more "simple" (or "clean"). I responded by explaining what had happened to the Web (it's slower, less accessible, lots of JavaScript etc.) and why the current approach works better for our relatively technical readers, some of whom are blind. An associate says: "The Morse headline file [for Techrights] is down to about 30-35 visitors per day. That's still something."
We currently have no intention of adding more complexity to the site, only more material. The substance - not "presentation" - is a lot more important. Many access the information via plain text (bulletins), Gemini Protocol, IRC etc.
People who spend too much time and effort refining "presentation" - where the refining is surrogate for "adding more features/complexity" - typically lose sight of what actually matters most and instead add technical "debt" (i.e. make it harder or more complex to keep the platform going).
"Simple"-looking sites aren't to be presumed less authoritative. We've seen some bloated and "big" sites whose articles are full of typos, misinformation, clickbait, and videos that start playing without the visitor's "consent". This might seem good for "traffic" or "hits", but they're just gaming the system with false measurements of stuff like "engagement". As if fetching some PNG file for your fancy bulletpoints somehow constitutes more "traffic".
What makes or breaks sites is what they write, not how many objects they deliver. █