I don't find gawker's new design to be particularly pleasant, subjectively speaking, but I do find it quite refreshing.

The 201X's world wide web was extremely dull, corporate, and homogenous; I won't be sad to leave it behind.

I agree with this exactly. Sick of corporate style and ready for change but also.. little hard to read this new look, but that’s change for ya

My theory is that people from traditional artistic fields are pivoting into the tech.

You can see this in design schools now, offering courses on UX/UI.

I'm not super excited because anti-aesthetics like Craigslist are rarely on art students' agenda.

My theory is that online blogs and publications tied themselves to social media over the past decade to drive higher traffic, but now need to cut the cord because their traffic is not their audience. It's Facebook's audience, and changes in the algorithm downgraded the frequency with which publication posts appeared on one's feed.

Now that responsive design is commonplace (not the case in 2012), websites can differentiate their offerings a bit more design-wise without affecting usability. Frankly, the differentiation is needed, as people are not habituated to go to the website first instead of passively browsing social media, where the algorithm may or may not surface one of the publication's stories.

I was thinking about these web trends today. The buzzy and dizzying color palettes make it more interesting but some are less legible than old geo cities. I almost always use the reader mode in Safari for long content. I also invest time in thinking through the best means to keep the web relatively open without ads and without borders. An average page load for major web destinations drives several cents (USD) in revenue. How many pages do people visit per day? It is not a negligible amount of revenue generated per person per day.

No mozilla reading mode support - truly rebellious

So rebellious that it won’t even load on my phone. All I see is a blinking eye, which I can only assume is a metaphor for the pervasive surveillance we’re subjected to on the web.

(/s but it really is just stuck at that blinking eye for me)

It's just like the rebellious web designs of the 90s, where 1.5 mb Flash splash screens wouldn't load on broadband.

Do you have javascript enabled?

Is this site rebelling against use of the "back" keybind? What reason is there to be intercepting and cancelling cmd+left?

It's rebelling against NoScript users by displaying an unnerving eyeball in the center of the page, as well.

Huh, thanks for that! I’m still missing backspace to go back sometimes, but I never knew about this. On Windows it’s alt+left.

So rebellious they completely forgot about accessibility.

Nothing says "rebellious" like private equity —

"Code and Theory is a proud member of The Stagwell Group, a private equity firm"

https://www.codeandtheory.com/about-us

If you want to see some real rebellion, take a look at shitmyself.com.

It is compatible with Netscape and IE, works without JS, is transparent/forkable/clonable, uses PGP for identity and a partially table based layout.

The captcha login is hn/hn

btw, I have worked for c&t and they do do some amazing work design-wise.

Is it rebellious because it reinforces the “read the [f] manual/good luck reading the manual” trope? I found it (consider linking it, even if you do nothing more to make it informative).

Site seems to be behind a password

I overlooked it the first time, too, but as OP wrote, the login is hn/hn