You guys should do some real A/B testing rather than rely on your own opinions.

A/B testing is exactly what has turned the web into a horrible soup of click bait.

Good design needs strong opinions.

I really liked what RSS readers did. Also the HN app pulls out the text from the article and shows it in a consistent style. We'll spaced black on white sans-serif text. No ads, no bullshit, just text and images. Same clean design for every post.

I would really love browsers to have a read mode, like incognito mode. If website owners want to make their site not work with standard html, then search engines should rank them lower.

I really don't care about wiggling text underlines. It hurts my eyes. I want accessible clean design optimized for readability and speed.

"I would really love browsers to have a read mode, like incognito mode."

Firefox does. It's fabulous.

Thats if you make decisions based on revenue, conversions, etc and not based on criteria that is most beneficial to the user. You need a little of both for a sustainable business.

Bad design does, too.

Depends what you want. A/B testing tends to lead to bland mediocrity. At the end of the day there is definitely something to be said a strong design statement that somebody is willing stand up for, even if it is a noble failure, when compared to the design by committee non-entity that A/B testing often leads to.

Lol, if that is the case, it seems strange to make such a polarizing decision about the horizontal rules. You will definitely turn away more readers that find them annoying than you will gain readers who are like "the article content is meh.... but those animated squigglies tho!"

Hm. I wonder, which one of those categories of people would change their decision to read or leave the article because of that.

Yes, I think it's those who love the squiggly line would (hypothetically) continue to read the site just because of cool design, and not the other way around.