> Boring competence wins hands down. Users and customers are scouting for competence. Most of the time, their antennae are not in fact up for individual artistic expression.

but even that doesn't really hold any more. The great slopification has made it so that people don't even associate that kind of thing with reliability. Instead it's gotten a kind of ca the year 2000 "thing out of a Chinese factory" vibe to it. Even on practical grounds you might as well give it your own shot now because that stuff is poisoned.

As a concrete example, if you wanted to make a Github competitor ten years ago you tried to look like Github, now you're better off trying to look like sourcehut or codeberg because you don't look like the thing that dies every five minutes.

It's not my argument that competent web design is a reliable signal, only that nobody is looking for incompetent design when they're shopping for a used Camry or a new rotary sander.

When Stripe or Braintree or Paypal deliberately mess up their designs so they can signal their humanity to customers, I'll check back in with this idea. Maybe companies will start introducing dumb bugs into their code, too, because if it's too perfect everybody will know a robot wrote it.