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Comment by mcdonje | Hacker News Reader

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mcdonje

The pic of the ugly site looks like it's full of blog posts, but this post is on a different site for some reason.

I would've rather been sent to the ugly site if it doesn't have marketing cookies and a membership popup.

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If you look at the screencap you see a mail to hello@taylor.town.

My first instinct was the same as yours so hf visiting https://taylor.town/

Edit: after posting this the taylor.town site became much slower - so maybe that's the hn hug of death gripping again

And the original linked article actually links at the bottom

> Taylor Troesh is mayor of taylor.town, author of scrapscript, and connoisseur of crap.

And on taylor.town is a link to the magazine article which they contributed.

Each of the blog screenshots has a caption like this:

> taylor.town in 202x

Clicking on the article on that site gets me back to the HN link.

I guess that's just a landing page with links to articles he wrote, but doesn't host himself? Strange.

And it really is ugly right now with the spotted background and slightly rotated links.

Is he aiming for the "I just discovered a new feature and so need to use it" vibe? Like when someone makes a PowerPoint presentation and now uses the completely over the top transitions across slides?

But design is subjective, and if you're doing something in your free time, you better enjoy it! So if he has fun making that ugly thing, great ( • ‿ • )

the background looks a lot like an old geocities page to me so I have to assume it's a fashion choice

The fact that people can’t see beauty in a thing like this feels to me like people looking at a field of flowers and calling it ugly for all the ways it doesn’t look like Disney Land.

Yeah, I thought this was one of those critiques of the enshittified web.

I think this website is bad, but I also think it is very funny to have:

(1) a banner about print editions (2) a cookie consent u (3) a header 'Good Internet' peeking through the now-familiar modern hallmarks of the bad internet, and (4) the first four words of the headline, which is being eclipsed by the cookie popup (5) Once you remove the cookie banner, there is now also a persistent cookie settings button, and a persistent "+ Become a Member" button.

taylor.town is a very good internet website by comparison

Yeah presumably because the ugly site has an awful background and poor font/colour choices that make it kind of hard to read. E.g.

https://taylor.town/wealth-000

I made my website myself too and it isn't ugly. This guy's website is ugly because he decided to make it ugly out of some misguided sense of self-importance.

Self-important - sure, the author says as much themselves.

But how is it misguided? OP is having fun on their personal site. Where would you guide them instead?

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