I'd argue while perhaps they are examples of brutalist functionality, the wikipedia, reddit and HN offer a very nice UX and a simple, easy to learn UI.

HN/Wiki/Reddit don't: break the back button, take forever to load 1000 JS/CSS files, have broken "infini-scrolling", or even break when JS is disabled (well, reddit kinda does now).

Compare that to the majority of over-engineered SPA-style webpages that employed many, many front-end engineers and UX designers, and Wikipedia, Reddit, HN as well as old-school Gmail and FB start looking amazing.

Man oh man do I miss old Gmail... that was a great interface. I exclusively use FB on mobile, no-js mode.

Web brutalism should be the new hotness.

Funny thing about inifi-scrolling is that it's designed to save bandwidth, but I'd wager that most of the time the extra JS packages are bigger than the content actually being "saved"

Sorta, it does save bandwitdth, but more importantly it is used to keep users on your site longer by removing the decision point of browsing to the next page. Though for the best effect you need to do it background so that user never really realises that the feed/list never really ends.

Whatever you do, just, please, add a link for the next page at the end of your results. You can move it later with JS once you downloaded more results, but make sure the link is there.

I'm quite tired of not being able to use sites on slow connections.

Actually, due to the way commenting works, HN breaks the back button.

Gmail was a revolutionary UI by standards of the day. It was one of a handful of apps that ushered in Web 2.0 and AJAX. Facebook was rougher to be sure, but if you compare to the tire fire of MySpace you realize it was relatively quite good.

Ajax was invented for Outlook Web Access.

I guess Gmail brought it to the masses, along with a decent amount of free storage.

I'm well aware that Microsoft invented AJAX, I don't see how that has any relevance to my point.

Author here, I agree that "good enough UI" will do but I can't remember Wikipedia or Gmail having a terrible user experience on launch.

In case of Reddit and HN, I started to use them many years after I learned about them – mostly because of the weird UX. I still prefer hckrnews.com for HN.

Who do you use instead of craigslist?

I don't live in the US but classifieds are more user-friendly in other countries.

You can't launch Craiglist in 2017 though. I know that there are numerous exceptions from the 00s and even from the App Store 5-6 years ago. But it's not the same anymore because blue oceans are rare nowadays.

I like Facebook Marketplace because I can search with in X miles of my location on my phone and I don't have to check, "Has Photos" like craigslist.

Ebay has a Craigslist competitor, too, in Germany running as ebay Kleinanzeigen.

Is that not what gumtree is in a lot of places?

That's what I've used in the UK and Australia, an ebay own it too.

Exactly

Or the classic example of Craigslist.

However, for all these projects, the UI may be relatively primitive, but the UX is outstanding because it's stripped to exactly the things the user needs to accomplish what they're trying to do.

Yes they have good enough UI but also there free to use. I know if I'm going to pay for software. It better look nice and function well or I'm not buying.