The stupidest, most fucking worthless, most asinine, most half-baked, most oafish, doltish and barmy response when someone complains about a bad design is to say, “Everyone always complains about a new design, so this means nothing, durrr.”

I’m thinking now of Ars Technica, but it happens every time there’s a new destructive design. Some Ars-employed moron observed that every new design they’d ever done had elicited massive complaints but that’s because every design for the last 15 years has been worse and more unreadable than the last.

Getting away from a moment from ranting rage, what is the sociology of this tendency? Why (or is there) an entire user-hostile and sense-hostile culture of design? How does something like that even develop?

Because that site doesn’t look good on a tablet, phone or desktop machine. So what the heck is it designed for? What is its purpose other than funding some design firm?

The sociology of this sort of thing is really interesting to me, though I have I fear little insight into it. That’s probably why it’s interesting. If I were a managing editor of a site like Ars, I’d fire every damn person who had anything at all to do with such a design atrocity.

What’s also mysterious is when traffic falls and the most devoted readers scamper away madly, no one ever questions the design as a cause — or they do only in a case like Digg, where the design caused such a precipitous decline in traffic that it was not possible to ignore as it literally drove the site out of business.

So, what gives? How has destructive and bad design overtaken all sense? Will we ever return to a relatively-sane design period that held from roughly 1998 to 2005 or so?