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I don't mind it. It doesn't detract from the on-topic discussion, certainly not as much as terrible websites detract from user experience.

Authors pay heed: Presentation matters. If you present your writing poorly, it will distract your readers from your ideas.

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And yet I'm confident that inevitably no one actually cares enough to contact the author and tell them that they need to change their site for reasons a, b and c.

This is a third-party news aggregator. It's very common that the submitter is not the author. So the author is usually not even in the vicinity to hear the complaining. All in all, just another manifestation of slacktivism.

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