Remember when Hacker News was the final fortress of the internet where content was king, and design was as minimalistic as the wardrobe of a monastic hermit? A place where intellectuals could congregate without being assaulted by the visual diarrhea that characterizes every other website on the planet. Those were the days when it was the text that mattered, not the tiny, shiny icons. But alas, those days are as dead as dial-up!
Once you start prioritizing style over substance, it's a downhill race on a greased slide. Today, it's just an innocuous favicon. But who's to say tomorrow we won't be suffering through animated logos, retina-burning background images, and God knows what other visual atrocities? Before we know it, we'll be swimming in a sea of unnecessary UI elements, auto-playing videos that nobody asked for, and a homepage that's more ad than actual content.
And they say progress is a good thing...