Well, you've got your wish. Every damned website now looks the same. Whatever creativity the early internet promised has now been snuffed out to appease the user-metrics gods.
I'm all for creativity but laying devil's advocate,..
who is this supposed creativity for? If the majority of people just want to scan headlines efficiently and read/parse.. isn't that a good thing for most people?
Pragmatically speaking, the creativity is not needed for news articles/headlines. We need better reporting / journalism in online news, not more creative frills..
I mean, for most of the twentieth centuries books all looked the same. Same handful of typefaces, sizes, margins, etc.
Newspapers also. Same handful of column layouts, typefaces, styling.
It's not about user metrics. It's that what's important is the content of the text itself, alongside whatever photographs and illustrations are necessary and informative.
Websites are no different from the long tradition of books and newspapers in this regard.
There are plenty of spaces for artistic, aesthetic creativity on the internet. No shortage whatsoever. More art than there's ever been before.
There's no need in also trying to shoehorn it into nonfiction articles everywhere.
The most creative parts of the early internet were on Usenet, I found. Posts all looked the same - better yet, they looked the way I styled them - but the look wasn't what was important.
It would be so much better if every website actually looked the same. Imagine the world if didn’t waste millions of human hours reinventing a date picker.
The early (graphical) Internet was black text on grey background with blue links and no images.
Myspace and Geocieties were already a couple of generation on from that, and ... frankly kind of a mess.
For the most part, I vastly prefer the Reader View rendering of websites over whatever's native. Design gets in the way of many things, including robustness and resilience over time (what happens when all those dependencies and embedded resources go away and/or are replace by pr0n, crypto miners, phishing, and/or surveillance payloads?), and simple legibility.
It's the exceedingly rare instance where "interactive" pages provide any additional information or capabilities, and virtually all of those are specialised one-offs. I'm thinking of several of the xkcd specials, or the work of Bret Victor or Nicky Case. I'm sorely hard pressed to think of any others. Mainstream pubs (notably the NY Times) are far worse for their efforts in this space.
