Which is silly. If I'm just trying to view a news article from yesterday or a year ago, I shouldn't have to worry about what some silly script is trying to do.

If the core of the content is or should be text, then there's no need for countless silly layers around it.

Maybe you want a PDF instead.

Or maybe some sort of "hypertext" document. That could contain links to other such documents, allowing users to easily navigate content. All this interlinked content could form some sort of "web" even.

When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. There are valid use cases that meteor.js is awesome for, but one should avoid cargo culting.

Maybe I'm getting old but sometimes I really really don't want real time updates.

You want to keep hitting refresh, refresh, refresh?

He wants the page not to change under him when he hasn't hit refresh. Personally, race conditions between user and UI drive me crazy.

Is this something people even want in content driven sites though? Imagine reddit in real time, it would be a mess and impossible to keep track of what you last read.

Why should users have to click refresh for pages to load more comments or to see when someone replies to you? The fact that reddit does not do this is not evidence that it would be confusing.

Because sites that distract me from what I'm reading to tell me that there are new comments are extremely annoying.

Sure, you could add, say, auto-loading for new comments when you reach the bottom of the page, or setting the message icon to orange when you get a reply, but that hardly requires a full-blown web app, it's a simple addon to a static site.

disqus deals with this issue quite well , disqus will just notify you there are new comments ,it's up to you to load them or not.

You can try out for yourself :)

http://telesc.pe

I have, and it works ok when there is a ton of concurrent users. But on the other hand, I don't think the UX of telescope is any better than reddit's and in some ways worse (example: clicking on a post with a large amount of comments cause the page to pause without any visual feedback. This could be fixed, but is any better than just a regular link?)

So, for static content that changes in real time.

No reason why you can't provide real time updates on your content driven site. and respect progressive enhancement. I'd submit this would be the easiest way to do it.