Man, I know. It used to be most text on the Internet was 16px or similar, and everything was legible.

Now you get people putting up blogs with 11px body text, and blogs with 24px body text. It's truly bizarre. I find myself having to change my browser zoom more and more, per-site, in order to make things a normal, readable size. Lately it's been more zooming out, with certain bloggers deciding to adopt grotesquely large font sizes.

I get that "breaking convention" can be good and all, but sometimes convention works pretty well.

Most browsers have a minimum font size option, I recommend you try it out.

Don't fall back on "well, the browser should prevent bad choices from authors/designers."

When it comes to design, there is no such thing as universally bad or universally good.

Too small to read is a pretty safe bet for the "not good" category. In fact, there's entire standards around what should guide your design process[1].

[1] http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility