The Website Obesity Crisis
I think it is because people (designers, coders, etc) get bonuses and paychecks for creating stuff more than tearing down stuff.Put this on your resume -- "Implemented feature x, designed y, added z" vs "Cut out 10k lines worth of crap only 10% of customers used, stripped away stupid 1Mb worth for js that displays animated snowflakes, etc". You'd produce a better perception by claiming you added / created / built, rather than deleted.So it is not surprising that more stuff gets built, more code added to the pile, more features implemented.  Heck, even GMail keeps changing every 6 months for apparently no reason. But in reality there is a reason -- Google has full time designers on the GMail team. There is probably no way they'd end the year with "Yap, site worked great, we did a nice job 2 years ago, so I didn't touch it this year."