Your sites are better at being tools ordinary human beings can use to their own benefit. They are (probably) terrible at generating money via ad revenue and tricking people into buying subscriptions that are then nearly impossible to cancel.
Making a site to share info and have fun is easy. Nearly anyone can do it. Making a site to actively exploit people in the most intense way possible while still being legal(ish) takes highly-trained experts.
Exactly. But I am using the measure of quality that I think is relevant. We call a chef good when we like the food, not when he finds a way to enrich a fast food chain.
Do your sites include interactive graphics and storytelling like the New York Times does? By what measure of "quality" are you setting yourself as "better" than the New York Times team?
I was circumspect in what I said and did not say. Rich Harris, the creator of Svelte, works for the Times. I use Svelte frequently, but would not have been able to create it. I don’t have his skills. And the interactive graphics that you are talking about are awesome. I don’t know how to do that, nor do I even understand how they are done some of the time. I was talking about the experience of navigating the front page and reading the articles, which is pretty bad. I am a better designer than whoever designs these pages. But I am not more skilled.
Making a site to share info and have fun is easy. Nearly anyone can do it. Making a site to actively exploit people in the most intense way possible while still being legal(ish) takes highly-trained experts.