Ask HN: Why No HTTPS on Paulgraham.com?
Why does it need HTTPS?
"encryption everywhere" is one of the stupider ideas that's come around lately. shared asset caching was a good idea, that was why there had been all that work done to support it. "Content Delivery Networks" would be far less important if we hadn't casually thrown that baby out with the bilgewater
maybe you didn't experience your ISP injecting ads into content you surfed?
https ensures that the content you see is the same as the server you get it from.
It's not about reading, it's about people changing the content while in transit
Everyone went bonkers over HAVING to have HTTPS when Google made it an SEO ranking factor. Everyone didn't really "need" it - site's that were just content with no form submissions or anything that should be kept private did it just for the "juice". Yes, you can't sniff the traffic, but the URL is still there in the headers and the logs.
Although, I'm sure the hosting companies loved that most of their clients now had to pay for those dedicated I.P. addresses and certs.