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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#21

Post by soared »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #5

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That's lower than the "average" news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that's more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb. I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long…

I don't think thats a meaningful comparison. Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. NYT employs 1,300 people.

When you read a book all you get is the text. NYT has text, images, related articles, analytics, etc. Moby Dick doesn't have to know what pages you read. NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough).

If Moby Dick was being rewritten and optimized every single day it would be a few mb. Its not, so you can't compare the two.

Yes NYT should be lighter, no your comparison is not meaningful. A better comparison would by Moby Dick to the physical NYT newspaper.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#23

Post by ryanianian »

Sorry but this piece comes across as entitled and whiny. It's easy to point out how bloated and terrible most modern large sites are and guffaw in disgust at the counts of xhttp requests and scripts that are loaded in order to provide no user benefit.

But just moaning about it probably won't make the problem go away. Simply rendering text isn't a business-model anymore unfortunately, and publishers are doing everything they can to actually make their content profitable.

Look: I hate the modern web as much as anyone and I always browse with ad-blocking on. But I turn it off for sites that I get real value from, and I pay monthly membership fees to news sites that I believe respect me as a visitor. My way of working isn't super great for me or for publishers (and I doubt most users turn off adblock for sites they value).

I was hoping this article would show some empathy for publishers and why they would start down the road of such user-hostile behavior. A complete piece would paint a vision for how to end the madness with a solution that is acceptable both to publishers and viewers. I don't know what that solution is, but I strongly doubt that just moaning and counting xhttp requests is part of it.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#24

Post by soared »

Have you ever seen this discussed outside of HN or dev-centric subreddits? Your average user doesn't care about this 'issue' at all, and thats why it won't ever change.

Proof the author doesn't relate to any typical user:

> I’m not asking much of it; I have opened a text-based document on the web

Nobody besides devs would open a website and think "Oh this a text-based document opened in a web browser". Its a website, not a word doc.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#25

Post by simmons »

pmarreck wrote: post #9

I am increasingly encountering news sites that detect ad blocking software and (understandably) refuse to show me their content as a result but the problem is that I enabled ad-blocking on those sites to begin with because they were loading nasty javascript ads on the fly which pegged my CPU! As a web dev, I feel extremely conscious about what I'd call "javascript library hygiene", and I feel that whoever's in charge…

I've noticed that a lot of sites will end up using 100% CPU usage on their Chrome tab. I haven't investigated, but I do wonder what sort of faulty design leads to this. You occasionally hear talk of sites using your CPU to mine cryptocurrency, but I'm more inclined to suspect lousy programming.

I sometimes wish I had an easy way in Chrome to restrict a tab to, say, 5% CPU, for the cases where the CPU usage is clearly not adding any value. Just so I can get through an article without the fan ramping up.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#26

Post by NKCSS »

The reason this website currently crumbles under the load is probably because the content is stored in a database, re-queried for every request, even though the content wil hardly ever change. Might be something else to look at ;)

Re: The Bullshit Web

#27

Post by [deleted] »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #5

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That's lower than the "average" news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that's more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb. I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long…

[deleted]

Re: The Bullshit Web

#28

Post by zajd »

soared wrote: post #21
cheezymoogle wrote: post #5

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That's lower than the "average" news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that's more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb. I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long…

I don't think thats a meaningful comparison. Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. NYT employs 1,300 people. When you read a book all you get is the text. NYT has text, images, related articles, analytics, etc. Moby Dick doesn't have to know what pages you read. NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that…

> They need data to produce the product

[citation needed]

There's no reason they need to use Javascript to track user behavior down to "how long have they read this article".

Re: The Bullshit Web

#29

Post by jlg23 »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #16

I agree with the spirit of the article, in that we should be striving for a leaner web. But last year I had to build an iOS SDK. As an SDK, we wanted it to be as small as humanly possible. It came out to around 12mb, which is obviously too large. So I tried removing literally everything but one file, and it came out to 10mb. So an iOS package, compiled, with only one class, comes out to 10 megabytes. Yes, the web can…

I dare to disagree: 10MB for a single-class-app is "as dire as some make it out to be".

For comparison: Doom 2 came on 4 1.44MB floppy disks, Duke Nukem 3D on 13. Full games, including all assets....

going into a quiet corner for some weeping

Re: The Bullshit Web

#30

Post by nickheer »

NKCSS wrote: post #26

The reason this website currently crumbles under the load is probably because the content is stored in a database, re-queried for every request, even though the content wil hardly ever change. Might be something else to look at ;)

It's cached and, I promise, hasn't crumbled under heavy load for years. I don't know what's going on but I've asked for more resources. It does make me sad and embarrassed, though, so that's something.
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