The only trick is you still need a way to convey what the site is about, make it easy to navigate, and display whatever information the user needs to see on any given page.
The only trick is you still need a way to convey what the site is about, make it easy to navigate, and display whatever information the user needs to see on any given page.
Don't do that.
If you want, make some other, throwaway messy version, host it on a different domain, and prove to yourself that messy is bad.
BBS's had personality. Hacker News has personality. And they're clean. Trying to make a website seem like it has personality by deliberately making it messy is an example of the worst kind of superficiality -- superficiality that lies about it's origin and intent.
I think a clinical, empty look wouldn't do, but adding more mess is the wrong direction.
edit: But the reason everyone isn't lost is because Vegas is basically one straight road with flashing lights on the sides. Which is more or less what I'm proposing.
Also, I see your point about the knowledge seeking demographic. Not sure whether I agree or not. For every Jimbo Wales looking to hire a philosophy postdoc, there could be a hundred MySpacers looking to hire someone to clean out their bongs. Or maybe not, who knows.
Also, on a different topic, there should be a way to embed ads for experts onto my blog or homepage.
Hypothesis: The less the users know what the site does and what they want to do, in other words the less clear the goal, the less important it is to minimize the number of clicks to reach that goal. And the more experience users have with a site, the more important it is to streamline the process.
I think premature optimization applies to not just code but also design. For example, joining the Wikipedia community is probably much more difficult now even though the meta pages are much more ordered and clean than a few years ago. Whereas when the community pages were a hodgepodge of random crap it was a lot easier to just jump into the community and start contributing.