... Which in a weird way describes some rather snazzy websites with inconsistent content policies and Kafkaesque appeals.
Since it's hidden, it's a kind of cryptobrutalism, to (perhaps unnecessarily) coin a new term.
This specific website we’re discussing is actually quite full of flourishes, and so not brutalist in the architectural sense.
I don’t really see that site as really brutalism even in this sense. If anything, it hews a lot closer to the Small Web, such as what one might find in Gemini space.
But this is a bit of a charicature of brutalism. In reality it does consider human experience, but it perhaps values different aspects of it. Brutalist paces are built to facilitate flows of people, to make it easy to get done what you need to. But it is also a reaction to traditional architecture styles which carries with them a lot of baggage: often certain social structures such as stratification, empire, patriarchy, racial inequality, etc. When we consider brutalism as an act of opposition to these, the humanistic intent behind it shines through, even though it make the building no more appealing.
Brutalist spaces can in my opinion be welcoming and inviting if furnished correctly. To me they have a nostalgic and hopeful connotation because I walked through them growing up. Nowadays they're a refreshing change from the kind of corporate glass and plastered concrete spaces of today.
So kind of like the positive-spin version of "this entity doesn't care who you are", in that it has no particular bias or judgement.
The mastodon client was OK.
“The Shortcut
$100 PlayStation gift card deal, Disney+ password crackdown, New Matrix movie, Budget AirPods, Samsung TVs [10h]”
(Hn saving you from all the emoji in that headline too…)
Sure, RSS readers do still exist, but they are anything other than brutalist. Janky UI/UX combined with rent-seeking subscription models, ultimately doing little or nothing that your native client couldn't have done.
Don't get me started on the fact that apps like Feedly are now trying to add AI/ML to the mix, entirely missing the point that if I'm using an RSS reader it's because I want to be the one to choose what I read and how.
Then even if all of that wasn't an issue, most publications wouldn't want to make it any easier to avoid their advertising and tracking interactions.