&gt; you should at the very least give us a hint as to why you&#x27;re doing that<p>Well, they did.  In the very thing you quoted:<p>&gt; On Medium, we speed this up a bit with JavaScript. [...] format=json,&quot; download the article text<p>eg, they send what actually changed, probably highly compressed and cached, and not an entire new webpage.  That&#x27;s not super uncommon, and it&#x27;s hardly weird or roundabout.  We can discuss whether they&#x27;ve correctly identified the bottleneck (although, spoiler, they have), or whether it actually improves things for their users in real world conditions (probably), or if the technical overhead is worth it for something like Medium (debatable, but apparently they have the funding...), but it&#x27;s not &quot;bizarrely strange&quot;.  It&#x27;s a well known technique, and while maybe it&#x27;s more common (and more sensible) to use it on a webmail app than a weblog, it&#x27;s not black magic.