> Disruption doesn't come from direct competition. Writing another web browser isn't going to disrupt the market for web browsers. You need a new concept in how we access web-type material. That would disrupt, and wouldn't need much code. Look at Napster et al. They weren't massive but still disrupted the music industry.

Sure but my point is more general: if I create a new lean web-like protocol and client and it can't display videos, feature interactive content, arbitrary styles etc... How do I drive adoption?

I can convince the suckless folks that "less is more" and that it's "the unix way" but outside of that circle I'm not sure who's going to use my software.

All software seems to be going in the opposite direction. For instance I'm a heavy user of IRC, these days the type of communities you could find on QuakeNet 15 years ago are on Discord, a super heavy webchat client that manages to slow down my beefy desktop computer when run on pre-quantom Firefox. The Discord client is probably several times heavier on resource usage than the Quake game itself!