Hacker News Reader

It's because HN readers have strong feelings against bloat, in software generally and especially on the web. Just mentioning that topic excites strong responses.

Perhaps you could interpret it as untapped demand for lightweight websites?

People probably upvoted prior to reading. I know I did, because the headline immediately told me I'll love the submission.

People also vote on the headline without actually reading.

I'd guess there's high correlation between people who want this and people who use emacs, which is a non-trivial portion of HN readers.

Well I am interested in lite websites as well but this list contains about 20 links with roughly half that aren't "lite versions of websites". I am just wondering why this is the topmost story.

Don't know how one relates to the other, but I for one know a couple of web sites which UX would vastly improve, were they accessed through Emacs instead of the web browser.