If you're not transferring private information, why does it matter if it's encrypted? Either you care if someone can eavesdrop or you don't.

The whole online presence might be something that some regard as private since reading a given URL might be as private as a forum password or card info.

But 'either you care or you don't' seems too inflexible to me.

For example, I might care that my bank has a certificate signed by a CA.

But for some usergroup's online forum, a self-signed certificate is enough. Sure, we might get some MITM but the barrier to this is so high and the relative importance of the online forum so low, it seems an adequate trade-off. I'd say there's a higher chance of the server hard drive failing than to see an actual MITM attack on a given niche server.

But overall, as I've said in another message here, I see this whole centralized design as flawed and much too expensive. Certificate info should be a DNS attribute.

If you only use encryption when you 'have something to hide,' then use of encryption is enough to incriminate you.