During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Desire for text‑only / low‑bandwidth sites

  • Many commenters want truly minimal “just text” versions, especially for emergencies and travel, citing lite/text subdomains (e.g., CNN, NPR), wttr.in, and tools like Firefox Reader mode or pure.md proxies.
  • Several note the irony that some “lite” pages still ship hundreds of KB–MB of CSS, JS, and cookie banners for a few KB of text, yet do at least function without JS.

Standards, RSS, and discoverability

  • There’s support for a convention (e.g., lite.domain.com) or HTTP Accept headers (text/plain, text/markdown) to request minimal content, and possibly a standardized “reader mode” signal.
  • RSS is nostalgically praised; some still use full‑content feeds, but many sites only provide teasers due to monetization.
  • Others argue the problem is not lack of standards but incentives: sites don’t promote or maintain lightweight options because most users don’t demand them.

JavaScript, bloat, and minimal HTML

  • Strong sentiment that what people really want is JS‑free or JS‑minimal sites: block most scripts, load images optionally, and rely on semantic HTML and small CSS.
  • Examples and movements are shared around ultra‑small pages (KB‑limited clubs, “motherf… website”, 1990s‑style HTML snippets).
  • The article’s own weight (multi‑MB Next.js page, heavy hero image) is criticized as undermining its message.

Progressive enhancement vs. “edge cases”

  • One side says designing for rare constrained conditions (disaster, 2G, old hardware) is unrealistic without clear business incentives; performance work supposedly has low payoff.
  • Others counter with accessibility / universal design analogies and data about latency hurting engagement and revenue; they see heavy sites as a mix of bad practice and perverse incentives.

Emergency information and redundancy

  • Multiple disaster stories (hurricanes, fires, landslides, war) highlight how bloated web apps, ISP apps, and social feeds failed under congestion, while AM/FM radio, public broadcasters, satellite messengers, or ad‑hoc text channels worked.
  • Some report Helene‑specific plain‑text news deployments that did reach tens of thousands, but weren’t widely known.
  • Suggestions include: mandated “old‑web” versions for government/emergency sites, prioritizing text‑first server rendering, offline copies of critical info, fuel and power planning, and multi‑SIM / radio setups.