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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

Because ~no users curate their fonts, and making your site look better for the ~all users who don't curate their own fonts is the better more pragmatic choice by such a large margin that it isn't really worth much thought.

Does this negatively affect your experience? Can't you override fonts if you want to?

Edit: note, I'm not the person the question was directed at, and have no connection to the federalist project at all.

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Every time I've visited a site where I thought, oh that's a terrible font, it's been basically one of these reasons:

  * Improper selection of default font for constrained display eg tabular
  * Or the more popular "Let's create a font because we can.  It's branding."

There are of course other considerations involved like the increasing diversity of rendering devices, but that doesn't make the fact that any web site font issue is nearly always the fault of the web site operator.

I can't recall any instance of "oh, that website with a great custom font is so appealing I'm going regularly and voraciously consume its content". The opposite of that is true though.

I know there have been a couple of occurrences where I dropped into the web dev tools to see which font a site was using because they used beautifully, fitting fonts.

Properly selected, fonts contribute to the user experience so seamlessly that most users don't even realize that the font used is something out of the ordinary.

This is similar in effect to users liking a site more when it is faster, but attributing the improvement to any number of other things that haven't actually changed.

Web fonts are very slow

On the list of things that make most sites slow. Web fonts is pretty low. Moh tajns if shitty JavaScript is a much bigger problem.

If you use link rel preload and font-display: optional, it's fine.

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