Forums? Nope. Blogging platforms? Nope. News sites? Nope. Wordpresss powered personal page? Nope. Mailing lists with web based management? Nope. They all have members.
What doesn’t have members or users? Static webpages. How much of the web is a completely static web page? Negligible amount.
So most of the sites have much more to protect than meets the eye.
Neglecting the independent web is exactly what led to it dying out and the Internet becoming corporate algorithm-driven analytics machine. Making it harder to maintain your own, independent website, which does not rely on any 3rd-party to host or update, will just make less people bother.
Web is a bit different than you envision/think.
Why can't this site just upload HTML files to their web server?
> Eyeball optimization: Different titles, cutting summaries where it piques interest most, some other A/B testing...
Any non predatory practices you can add to the list?
I'm not a web developer, and I don't do anything similar on my pages, blog posts, whatever, so I don't know.
The only non-predatory way to do this is to being honest/transparent and don't pulling tricks on people.
However, I think, A/B testing can be used in a non-predatory way in UI testing, by measuring negative comment between two new versions, assuming that you genuinely don't know which version is better for the users.
1. Journalists shall be able to write new articles and publish them ASAP, possibly from remote locations.
2. Eyeball optimization: Different titles, cutting summaries where it piques interest most, some other A/B testing... So you need a data structure which can be modified non-destructively and autonomously.
Plus many more things, possibly. I love static webpages as much as the next small-web person, but we have small-web, because the web is not "small" anymore.