I’d argue that in many of these instances, less is far more.
I want my car to just be really good at being a car, reliably get me from A to B. A Bluetooth connection to the stereo system is nice, but I don’t need a freaking 20” phablet right next to my face when I’m driving.
When I go to a website, I’m usually looking for information, to read something. I don’t often want fancy scroll and animations, I just want clear readable text free of distractions.
More and more these two examples seem to be going away, we’re losing the plot of what the point of these things are.
In a lot of ways, I agree with you. I think the key thing is that the complexity should be appropriate to what needs to get done.
Animations and etc. that distract from the actual content are superfluous. Agreed! I hate it when sites scrolljack.
But lots of HN posters want to impose the same austerity on every website, regardless of whether it’s appropriate. You can’t build Linear in 100KB of JS. Nor would you want to run it on 1 GB RAM. And that’s the case for a lot of economically useful applications.
Keeping things as simple as possible shouldn’t be the goal. It should be keeping it simple enough for the use case at hand.
I want my car to just be really good at being a car, reliably get me from A to B. A Bluetooth connection to the stereo system is nice, but I don’t need a freaking 20” phablet right next to my face when I’m driving.
When I go to a website, I’m usually looking for information, to read something. I don’t often want fancy scroll and animations, I just want clear readable text free of distractions.
More and more these two examples seem to be going away, we’re losing the plot of what the point of these things are.