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GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

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Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#171

Post by acchow »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #105
_bxg1 wrote: post #86

Websites can be "documents" or they can be "apps". It's great that we now have the option to build the latter, but far too many things that should be simple documents (news sites, I'm looking at you) are trying to be apps, and it's virtually always a worse user experience, setting aside the cost in load time, memory, and battery usage. I'm saying this as a JavaScript developer.

The market has spoken. No seriously, if it sucks so much, why haven't users responded by going somewhere else, thus incentivizing sites to behave well?

They do and they have. A ton of old media companies are going bankrupt.

USA Today definitely would not have survived another 5 years with 25 second page loading times. Or at least, such an old website wouldn't have generated enough revenue to survive long term (and USA Today would put their content on something else like Apple News, Youtube, etc)

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#172

Post by TulliusCicero »

white-flame wrote: post #170
TulliusCicero wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but people are saying that it makes the UX really obviously terrible too.

I agree, but the providers are financially incentivized to make the UX worse via all this stuff, which reduces the number of providers offering a non-terribled UX. In becoming ad revenue maximizers, taking for-granted assumptions on audience, this situation doesn't optimize for serving the audience well. And since their models are to provide content in bulk, it keeps users served "well enough" to keep coming back, as…

> the providers are financially incentivized to make the UX worse via all this stuff

Yes, but again, that's only true because apparently the UX isn't actually bad enough to push away a significant chunk of their userbase.

> Fundamentally, people visit sites and endure bad UX if the content is there to draw them. The utility cost of bad UX often isn't the dominating factor.

Agreed. But you could also interpret this as, "people don't mind this type of UX that much".

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#173

Post by ddebernardy »

ahallock wrote: post #129
rayiner wrote: post #55

This is great. (1) How do I pretend to be from the EU? (2) Th EU should make a law requiring HTML versions of pages with no JS. The evolution of the Internet in the last two decades has been such a tremendous disappointment. It really peaked in the early 2000s (when I got my first DSL connection but before JS became a thing).

> Th EU should make a law requiring HTML versions of pages with no JS. I know this is well-intentioned, but so is most authoritarianism. We don't want to go down that road. Your personal preferences don't get to become law.

Not so, it's about basic accessibility, so blind readers can use your site. The EU could and probably should dig into that at some point too, and the rest of the world will (hopefully) benefit. (I added hopefully because, unfortunately, a number of websites have engaged in dick moves; namely implementing GDPR protections for EU users only or blocking EU users entirely.)

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#174

Post by wdr1 »

wlll wrote: post #6

The day I added an ad blocker (Adblock Plus, Ghostery and uBlock origin) was the day my CPU fans stopped spinning almost constantly, my battery life improved, web pages loaded faster and were more responsive. My experience of the web is about a thousand times better than it used to be. I will remove all these when the ad companies and websites start to behave themselves, which will be never.

> I will remove all these when the ad companies and websites start to behave themselves, which will be never.

Maybe, maybe not.

The problem with straight up blocking of all ads is obviously it cuts of funding for content creators whose work I enjoy.

What I really want is blocking of the ridiculous crap you find in ads, but still allow reasonable publishers to show ads & monetize.

That's why I'm hopeful for the "Coalition for Better Ads". It's essentially trying to define that standard across multiple parties.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#175

Post by [deleted] »

znpy wrote: post #163
acdha wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The federal government in the US is profoundly dysfunctional to the point where this isn't worth the time or money If everyone who says that voted in the primaries and mid-term elections it wouldn’t be true. The party of dysfunction is in charge now but only because so many people choose not to vote.

In their defense, last vote was on a working day and not all employers let their employees skip work to vote. It's weird that voting does not take place on a non-working day in the US (like Sunday, for example).

[deleted]

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#176

Post by adrianmonk »

rayiner wrote: post #95
jaredklewis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Th EU should make a law requiring HTML versions of pages with no JS. Having politicians and lawyers micromanage technology decisions for the entire Internet? What could possibly go wrong.

Couldn’t get any worse? The Internet is basically unusable today.

You're writing that comment on a site that uses Javascript:

https://news.ycombinator.com/hn.js

It seems pretty usable to me. I haven't found the Javascript intrusive here.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#177

Post by chubot »

jlarocco wrote: post #143
dman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you liked the effect of installing an adblocker give disabling Javascript a try. (You can selectively whitelist a small number of websites). Did this a couple of years back and the difference is astounding.

I'd be willing to bet your "small number" of white listed websites is actually a lot more than you think. Turning off Javascript breaks a ton of sites, IME. Same thing with cookies. On a side note, web developers have gotten really lazy at feature checking. In the IE days they'd at least have a banner saying their page wasn't going to work because it required IE or Netscape. Browsing with cookies turned off nowadays,…

Disabling JavaScript actually works great on news sites as far as I remember.

It used to be that disabling JS rendered web pages illegible. But good CSS changed that. So now you can read sites perfectly fine with JS. You can't interact, but you can read.

EDIT: Wow I just tried disabling JS on nytimes.com and it's INCREDIBLE. Reallly, try it. In Chrome I used the pattern [*.]nytimes.com. Not sure what that syntax is.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#178

Post by mmt »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #140
_euvw wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or: the market does not (always) work. This too is an option.

Agreed, and my comment was partially as a response to the anti-regulation demo here on HN. But, it's still something worth probing into: if it really does make the user experience worse -- and I agree it does -- why haven't people punished those sites by going elsewhere? My best guess is that it's like bad customer service: it bugs people, but it's not really the differentiating factor when choosing a product/service…

Don't be so sure people aren't going elsewhere. Besides craigslist, there's also the not-Internet option, which I think many of us on here forget, possibly largely because it's so seemingly difficult to measure (in our skewed experience).

I've met many young people who still default to pen-and-paper for things like note-taking. It's tempting to dismiss them as luddites, but I can't exactly blame them, given how much I know about just how user-hostile modern computer software and hardware can be.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#179

Post by pronik »

I have a very strange feeling that GDPR will end up resetting the internet (in a good way). It's already astonishing how we're getting unsubscribed from every possible mailing list we didn't want to be on in the first place, and it'll become even more awesome when all the websites will take notice, how little they are allowed to do in terms of piling crap on top of their web presence. I'm rather excited about the future right now.

Re: GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

#180

Post by jwilk »

kisstheblade wrote: post #34

Tried to open the twitter link. Asked me to agree to their terms to continue to use th service. Answered no. No the link just says "Oops, something went wrong. Please try again later." (the link is https://twitter.com/i/flow/consent_violation_flow ) Gotta love the GDPR, a nice way to get rid of all the "social media" crap and hundreds of ad trackers that has infested every corner of the internet.

Archived copy will hopefully work better:

https://archive.is/NX3VY

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