When I was a teen, I became the kid who transferred schools. You know the type: someone who lived in transition, changing schools, neighborhoods, and friends often. At its worst, I changed high schools five times in three years. And like many things at that age, the transfers were for reasons out of my control.

I had two revelations during those years when I was learning about both who I was and wanted to be. The first was that each move was a chance at reinvention. The second was that no matter my goals for who I wanted to be, I would be a product of my setting. Whether I liked it or not, the opportunities I had—and my potential to seize them—would be meaningfully influenced by my setting. For better or worse, who I was would be partly the result of what was around me.

This month, Lifehacker was sold from G/O Media to Ziff Davis.

Some of the changes have been immediate. If you’re a regular reader, for example, you may have noticed that Lifehacker stopped publishing slideshows. Slideshows were a reality of our previous context, whether I liked it or not. (I did not.) Those in-line ads are gone, too.

After seeing our site free of its usual glut of ads, one editor said, “I want to cry.” It was a joke, but also it wasn’t.

Another editor said, “Whoa, the page just…loads. And then after each paragraph of text is another paragraph of text.”

If you don’t work in digital media or live on the internet, you might find those things unremarkable. But to us, they’re huge UI improvements that make our stories look better and read mo