For me, Medium provides a very readable experience that is much better than the average static blog. And I don't have to fear a malware ridden page like an old Wordpress installation.
Sticky header/footer, cookie consent covering the menu, not a single line of the content visible. You consider this design good?
I might be wrong with this specific site on the JS - it only loaded 121KB Javascript. The actual HTML of the entry is 30.
WordPress nowadays upgrades itself to minor version - security patches - without touching it, and they release security patches for ancient versions as well. I'm aware there are unpatched sites out there, but they are either ancient - 5+ years - and untouched since, or deliberately crippled.
Average static blog has a very decent default theme.
But hey, different people, different opinions.
I also don't think the JS is that bad here, the site loaded pretty fast for me even when I tested with a slow 3G network. But yeah that UI doesn't give a good reading experience.
An on the other other side Firefox's reading mode makes this whole discussion irrelevant.
It really doesn't. It doesn't fix it for non-firefox and non-power users.
The "Shitty design is fine because I personally know a way to get around it" school of thought never made sense to me.
And enabling reader mode doesn’t need any power user skills, does it?
It "only" has 70%+ of the browser market share, and growing.
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/hFzKwoir...
On the other hand, reader view, which removes all that, works well on the page.
I barely see anything at all. I managed to take a peek at the title between two large bars of some other stuff I don't care about.