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Comment by devilshaircut | Hacker News Reader

I didn't say text is bleak and characterless. I said that having no design variation is bleak and characterless.

Then style the web as you fit on your own browser, but don't try to impose your design sensibilities on mine. That's why I keep saying 'client side'. I prefer not to download and process most of the graphic cruft that I see, and vastly prefer reading articles in an RSS reader to visitng pages that remind me of being a shopping mall.

You are already able to do this; simply disable stylesheets or as you said use a reader app. We've already discussed using technology like adblocker.

Your issue therefore is not with the design but rather with the browser. There is nothing preventing you from using a text-based browser or even writing your own.

I do not know if you are a developer, designer, or something else, but you must realize that minimalism is itself a "design sensibility" as you term it.

I appreciate where you're coming from and I'm sorry if my earlier comments came off as snippy. But I do think the influence of design on the web has been too heavily tilted towards the publisher end and not enough towards enabling the consumer.

I have the skills and experience to retool my browsing experience for my more minimalist aesthetic, but most consumers experience the web as something more like an animated version of a supermarket checkout magazine. Since getting a smartphone a few years back, I've been especially struck by how much bandwidth is consumed on transmitting cruft on things like news stories, where the actual text is only a few kilobytes and relevant photographs take up no more than a few hundred kb; but after you pile on all the trackers, divs, ads, etc. etc. the page ends up being many megabytes and can easily take 30 seconds over a typical 3g connection.

To me that's enormously consumer-hostile to very little real publisher benefit; the more shit I have to download to see a page the less likely I am to consume news from that source and the more likely I am to reinforce my ad blockers etc. (whereas I will make exceptions for site that make restrained use of such things so they can get a little extra ad revenue or tracking data value in return for the service they provide).

I agree that ads can be garish. I just see this as a separate problem from design itself.

Recently XKCD made me think about how minimalism fits into design. For example, entirely text-driven:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_pace_of_modern_life.png

... and more visually oriented:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/balloon_internet.png

Obviously there are many ways to communicate ideas, and each in various contexts can be quite effective.

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