Round trips for ad auctions are a part of it, but my take is that there are redundencies, literally a dev team that doesn’t exist anymore wanted to use one metrics tracker, it was never deleted and a newer team introduced a separate stack to check how long you gaze (sorry, “dwell”) at each paragraph. Multiply this by 10 years. Medium used to be relatively snappy (cached CSS and text + pretty slick lazy loaded images) but nowadays its another lumbering dinosaur.

I guess it’s related to that notion “groups of people can never admit a mistake” - if they ever did a clean sheet redesign it could turn into neo-facebook/reddit (somehow even slower due to extremely tall dependencies) - but they can never go back to first principals of how the site used to work, it would be admitting that things have gotten worse with time.