Ask HN: Favorite text heavy blogs that are a joy to read?

A simple question about pleasant, text-first blogs turned into a full-on crowd-sourced style tribunal. One blogger asked Hacker News for sites that are actually enjoyable to read—think clean pages, readable fonts, sensible menus, and code samples that don’t feel like punishment—and the community responded like they’d been waiting years to vent about the internet’s design crimes. The biggest mood? People are exhausted by flashy, ad-choked “modern design” advice and desperately want websites that let words breathe.

The recommendations came in fast, but the real spice was in what readers praised and what they quietly dragged. LessWrong got love for its left-side table of contents and right-side margin notes, basically earning “teacher’s pet” status for thoughtful layout. Works in Progress got a clean nod, while nesbitt.io sparked the classic internet compliment sandwich: looks great, but please, for the love of loading times, speed it up. Then came the minimalist mic drop: motherfuckingwebsite.com, a legendary joke-site slash manifesto that says the best design may just be… not trying so hard.

That’s the drama in a nutshell: fancy features vs. pure readability. Readers weren’t fighting so much as staging a polite rebellion against clutter, bloat, and design-by-marketing. The funniest part? In a thread about “modern design,” some of the loudest applause went to sites that basically whisper, just use black text and stop being annoying.