Keep it simple, stupid

The web is overrun with junk. This is so obvious, I almost don’t need to say it. But I will: Between the pop-ups, the autoplaying videos, the cookie banners, the incessant calls for sign-ups, the coupon offers, the “Don’t forget to subscribe!” reminders on top of the other “Don’t forget to subscribe!” reminders, the in-line ads slowing the page down, the slew of trackers also slowing the page down … you get the idea. For lots of reasons, some good and some bad, much of the internet has become totally unusable.

Plain Text Sports is nothing like any of those sites. The site, created by developer Paul Julius Martinez (who you might know as CodeIsTheEnd all over the internet), is more like something out of the 1970s, a wall of monospaced plain text with ASCII-art boxes surrounding real-time scores for all the professional sports games happening right now. It has no images, no pop-ups, no trackers. It loads practically instantly, even on a bad connection. I’ve been refreshing it obsessively the last few weeks, through the end of the NBA seasons and the beginning of March Madness. Not only is it a useful site for sports fans, but it feels like a harbinger of things to come.

Martinez started working on Plain Text Sports because of his own frustration with the state of the web. In early 2021, he was in Wisconsin, spending part of the pandemic on his family’s farm. He was trying to watch a Packers game, but, “we get not-great internet reception,” he said, “so I checked the score on my phone, checked ESPN.” Even that page, with all the ads and trackers and JavaScript, wouldn’t load. He’d been thinking about a super-simple sports site already, but that made up his mind.

Plain Text Sports was initially just for NBA scores, but Martinez has been systematically adding other sports. Each one takes some work, as Martinez has to teach his system how to ingest data, what scores mean and how various APIs work. But once it’s up and running, he said, the site more or less runs itself. More recently, he’s added the ability to go back and forward in time, so you can see upcoming games or go back through a season.

There are lots of other things Martinez could add to Plain Text Sports, even things that would ostensibly make it a “better” app. Maybe it should have user accounts, I said, so visitors can personalize their own homepage? Maybe you should have affiliate links to tickets and make some money! Martinez just shook his head. “I’m a software engineer who reads Hacker News every day, obsessively,” he said, “but I’m also kind of a Luddite.” He hates smart TVs, he said, because he hates flipping through menus when all he wants is to watch TV. He loves that Plain Text Sports is simple. “There’s no cookie banner, there’s no GDPR banner, there’s no asking-you-to-donate banner.”

The downside, of course, is that Plain Text Sports doesn’t make Martinez any money. Right now, he’s OK with that. He said that because the site is so simple and low-bandwidth, his Amazon CDN bill is only about $50 a month, and it’s mostly a fun side project anyway. Its success may change that, though: After recently hitting the front page of Hacker News and being featured on Daring Fireball, he said the site’s traffic went up 100x overnight, to about 100,000 homepage loads a day. (Those are all the analytics he has, because, again, simplicity.) Since then it’s dropped, but it’s still 10x what it was a few weeks ago. At some point, he might have to put an ad on the site. But it’d probably be plain text.

The success of the site has made Martinez wonder what else might benefit from the Plain Text treatment. He’s been thinking about Plain Text Stocks, or maybe even Plain Text Stonks, though the latter seems to be better-suited to a chaotic and hyper-monetized site instead of something simple and sparse. He wants to do the Plain Text treatment for European soccer, and for cricket. “There are like a billion people in India who probably don’t have great internet service,” he said, “and they love cricket!”

Plain Text Sports is hardly the first of its kind, of course. Simple, single-purpose websites are a longtime staple of the internet, from Did Duke Win to Busy Simulator to Netflix Codes to Down for Everyone or Just Me. But Plain Text Sports manages to be that simple on the front end with a surprising amount of complexity on the back end, making sure the whole sports world is represented in real time on that page.

In general, we’re starting to see developers and designers rebel against the general overwhelm of the internet, as sites and apps ditch their cruft and complications for things that load faster and work more intuitively. Social networks are bringing back chronological feeds; reading modes are now everywhere in browsers. Even apps like Obsidian, a favorite among productivity obsessives, are based primarily on plain text.

They don’t look like much, but that’s kind of the point.

You tell us

We asked you for your favorite underrated/unknown apps and services, and you responded! Here were a couple of our favorite responses:

“Privacy.com, creates 1-off credit cards for questionable merchants. Meandmyid.com, creates 1-off email addys to control and pinpoint the origination of spam. Favorite game: Curvy.” — Chris

“It was Outline.com which let you just read an online article by stripping out all the extra ads, banners, notifications and other Internety nonsense. The site hasn't worked for weeks though, unfortunately.” — Sam Rothermel (Sam, you should try Reader Mode!)

And thanks to everyone who pointed us to this Reddit thread, which got 13,400 responses to a simple question: “What is the coolest website you’ve visited that nobody knows about?” It’s a gold mine.

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