"Substack is run by tech industry veterans who probably hired a team of really experienced designers"
That is exactly why it's bad.
In an industry that generates so much profit that it literally does not matter whether you do a good job or a merely passable job, "experienced" does not mean "competent". It means "has internalized years of cargo cult practices".
There is no competitive pressure to make the best design - at best, there is pressure to copy the designs of the biggest companies, and those companies themselves are already big enough that people are just going to use their products regardless of how bad they look and how user-unfriendly they've become.
Nobody is going to unilaterally stop using Youtube, or Twitter, or their iPhone because of a little extra whitespace here and there, or because buttons lost their bevel, or because the website loads and runs a little bit slower due to all the extra bloated javascript running in the background. Everyone will bitch about it, but keep using the product, and so anyone who is trying to do A/B testing in these places will only get pure noise out of any measurement they're trying to make.
Fast forward a couple decades and that's how you get to the situation we're in right now, not just in web design but generally in all computer software. Everything is slower, buggier, and less usable than it should be, sometimes by multiple orders of magnitude. As a fun example, 3d video games are running enough math to compute and draw an entire three-dimensional world with tens of millions of triangles and complex interacting physics, and they're doing it SIXTY TIMES EVERY SECOND. (at least! More than twice that if you're using a 144Hz monitor). That is, they're doing it once every ~16.67 miliseconds. (6.95ms at 144 frames per second). Consider that fact, next time you open some boring 2d software on your computer and it takes a couple *seconds* to load a dozen flat buttons and images, and then you click on a menu and it inexplicably hitches for a few *hundred milliseconds*. Consider what kind of code could be written that manages to waste on the order of a billion cpu cycles, to do something we were already doing in the 1970s with computers that were at least 10000 times slower.
Software developers will often be quick to come up with excuses as to why it's actually reasonable, that everything is more complex now, and have you thought of X and Y, but there is no explanation you can come up with that explains a discrepancy this massive.
It's fully reasonable to think "these are professionals, who are being employed by very successful companies, and they are intelligent people who work very hard, so they can't possibly be doing a bad job - this must simply be the best humans can do", but it is wrong.
They are intelligent people, who work very hard, and the companies who employ them are very successful. It just doesn't matter if they do a bad job.
"Substack is run by tech industry veterans who probably hired a team of really experienced designers"
That is exactly why it's bad.
In an industry that generates so much profit that it literally does not matter whether you do a good job or a merely passable job, "experienced" does not mean "competent". It means "has internalized years of cargo cult practices".
There is no competitive pressure to make the best design - at best, there is pressure to copy the designs of the biggest companies, and those companies themselves are already big enough that people are just going to use their products regardless of how bad they look and how user-unfriendly they've become.
Nobody is going to unilaterally stop using Youtube, or Twitter, or their iPhone because of a little extra whitespace here and there, or because buttons lost their bevel, or because the website loads and runs a little bit slower due to all the extra bloated javascript running in the background. Everyone will bitch about it, but keep using the product, and so anyone who is trying to do A/B testing in these places will only get pure noise out of any measurement they're trying to make.
Fast forward a couple decades and that's how you get to the situation we're in right now, not just in web design but generally in all computer software. Everything is slower, buggier, and less usable than it should be, sometimes by multiple orders of magnitude. As a fun example, 3d video games are running enough math to compute and draw an entire three-dimensional world with tens of millions of triangles and complex interacting physics, and they're doing it SIXTY TIMES EVERY SECOND. (at least! More than twice that if you're using a 144Hz monitor). That is, they're doing it once every ~16.67 miliseconds. (6.95ms at 144 frames per second). Consider that fact, next time you open some boring 2d software on your computer and it takes a couple *seconds* to load a dozen flat buttons and images, and then you click on a menu and it inexplicably hitches for a few *hundred milliseconds*. Consider what kind of code could be written that manages to waste on the order of a billion cpu cycles, to do something we were already doing in the 1970s with computers that were at least 10000 times slower.
Software developers will often be quick to come up with excuses as to why it's actually reasonable, that everything is more complex now, and have you thought of X and Y, but there is no explanation you can come up with that explains a discrepancy this massive.
It's fully reasonable to think "these are professionals, who are being employed by very successful companies, and they are intelligent people who work very hard, so they can't possibly be doing a bad job - this must simply be the best humans can do", but it is wrong.
They are intelligent people, who work very hard, and the companies who employ them are very successful. It just doesn't matter if they do a bad job.