Semafor, a global news publication that launched in late 2022, originally focussed on publishing e-mail newsletters. The rise of the newsletter was another strategy for building loyal audiences without relying on social media: rather than try to get readers to visit your Web site, you deliver your content straight to their in-boxes. But over time Semafor’s site has become more important. “It actually felt like a slightly counterintuitive choice to say, ‘We’re going to invest in building a Web page,’ ” Ben Smith, the co-founder of Semafor, told me. Smith was the long-running editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, a publication built to distribute content through social media. “We were convinced that home pages were dead. In fact, they were just resting,” he said. (The New Yorker launched a redesigned home page in late 2023, having reached a similar conclusion.)
How bad does this break websites in general?
My starting perspective is that websites are already broken. They’re broken when they A) attempt to restrict you/your browsing, B) hoover up visitor data to share with data brokers, C) assail you with advertisements, and so on.
So “breaking” pages by stripping out CSS and javascript is, IMO, worth the change in how one views the web if that’s what it takes to neuter the above issues.