I’m going to respectfully disagree about FR and simplicity. You can’t even post a photo unless you brush up on HTML. You can’t block rude and profane posters that attack you, and trust me, as a woman on here I have experienced more nasty men posting the most rude things to me that ever I have on Twitter.
Yeah, this is the other thing you mention. They already have so much of our information we would probably be shocked. I have experienced more than once simply talking about an item I may wish to buy, NEVER having searched for it once and it started coming up on websites I visited. Spooky.
Also, as in my bio here and on other sites I post on such as Twitter I use my read name. I’m not afraid not to be anonymous anymore.
Well the rudeness is pretty much non-gender specific, both genders get it the same here. Unfortunately common courtesy or gallantry is no longer a thing in our culture.
As for the site here, have to put yourself in the domain owner’s shoes. Less moving parts means less to break. Less server bandwidth is needed to handle a much larger load. And on more modern sites all those cool extra features just gives them more opportunity to hide something in the mix.
I have to share that as a co-webmaster on another conservative site that is indeed fully loaded, there are some reasons why it is much more secure having it simple. For example... We have one click image URL and drop in auto video embedding.
We have no third party APIs installed. Yet when a Video is embedded in our site it always comes with 3rd party API connections attached. Can’t embed without these, they wont let it work on the other end. And it would be much more secure to not have that feature and make everyone link out to the videos instead like they do here at the FR.
And what I have observed is when you make it too easy to embed images, you end up with nothing but images and Memes in a thread. The dialog, conversation, and debate drops off almost to nothing. And when a thread is nothing but a bunch of images to load it is slow and hard on folks who have a slow connection. Yes, there are still slow connections out there believe it or not. :)
A voting/likes system does the same with dialog. Everyone runs around voting or liking instead of actually engaging in thoughtful dialog with each other.
So there is a give and take, and one has to look at it from all sides. :)