Wait... is he actually saying the site has nice design, or was that a joke?

I thought it was a call back to praise being dismissed and thought less intelligent.

No, I was being earnest.

Interesting. I'm on Windows and I tend to find sites with custom fonts render terribly, but this one is quite pleasant.

The fonts render correctly - they are slightly large, however, and there is an absurd amount of space on the left and white sides of the page.

There's a strange sort of parallax-scrolling effect where some items actually hang off the side distractingly.

It looks more like an example of funky design rather than something designed for readability.

This is all IMHO.

It looked great on the iPad, really readable.

Optimized for mobile maybe?

It's unreadable by default with Javascript disabled on Firefox, but Reader View fixes it.

Reader view has rescued many a reading experience! I'd love it if I could set it as the FF default for opening webpages.