Ugly Wins, Every Time
The ugliest websites always win. MySpace before the redesign that killed it. Facebook, which was never good-looking and remains a visual atrocity to this day. YouTube. Wikipedia. Google, which is genuinely, inexplicably hideous and has more daily users than the population of most continents. There’s a theory I have about this: the uglier the site, the more it forces you to fight through it, and fighting creates investment. You’ve suffered here. It’s yours now. Beautiful design removes friction, and friction is apparently what keeps people coming back.
Hipster Runoff was the most visually offensive blog on the internet and also one of the most widely read. Carles—always just Carles, never a last name—wrote about bad music, tormented youth, and the ambient absurdity of being young and online in the 2000s, in a relentlessly ironic, grammatically deranged style that was completely his own. I found it genuinely inspiring in a way that’s hard to explain without sounding like I’m missing the joke. He was funny and smart and had the gift of making readers feel slightly unhinged in a way they kept coming back for.
Then he got tired. After years of it he posted something about maybe retiring, announced a fashion brand (essentially one T-shirt), and handed the blog over to a woman named Becca and a few other contributors to keep running while he figured out his next move. What followed was a week of sustained reader fury—comments full of profanity and betrayal, genuine grief dressed as contempt, the readership turning on the new voices like they’d been personally deceived. Which in some sense they had. The blog had a voice that felt singular and they’d built something around it, and discovering it could be franchised out revealed that the singularity might have been, at least partly, an illusion.
Carles came back. Becca was out. But the damage was real—some readers had left for good, others were now suspicious, and a few wanted him gone entirely as punishment for the attempt. The comeback couldn’t undo the lesson: a blog is only the sum of its author. The logo, the domain, the posting schedule—all of it is scaffolding that means nothing the moment someone else sits in the chair. Once you let that happen, you find out what was actually holding it together, and the answer is usually just one person’s particular way of seeing things.
Which is something I think about often, for reasons that should be obvious.