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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#31

Post by throwawaymath »

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…

> 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).

No they don't. They really don't need to know any of that. They don't even get a pass on tracking because they're providing a free whatever - I pay for a subscription to the NYT. The business, or a meaningfully substantial core of it, is viable without tracking.

It would be nice if the things I pay for didn't start stuffing their content with bullshit. What and who do I have to pay to get single second page loads? It's not a given that advertising has to be so bloated and privacy-invasive. Various podcasts and blogs (like Daring Fireball) plug the same ad to their entire audience each post/episode for set periods of time. If you're going to cry about needing advertising then take your geographic and demographic based targeting. But no war of attrition will get me to concede you need user-by-user tracking.

You want me to pay for your content? Fine, I like it well enough. You want to present ads as well? Okay sure, the writing and perspectives are worth that too I suppose. But in addition to all of this you want to track my behavior and correlate it to my online activity that has nothing to do with your content? No, that's ridiculous.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#32

Post by pasta »

What I think is difficult is that most people think a website should be an experience.

The client wants this, the designer wants this, the marketeer wants this and even most users want this.

So that's how huge headers with high res photo's are born.

After that the site must be online asap and the developer doesn't have or take the time to load images responsive.

Combine this with a framework that takes 200ms to init and we are where we are now.

(And then ofcourse there is the marketeer telling you to include a script from x,y and z.)

With the right tools you can build a fast web, but I think most developers are not experienced, lazy or just don't care. (You don't need to include 0.5MB of FontAwesome when you only use 2 icons...)

And yeah: AMP is a joke.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#33

Post by paulsutter »

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…

You’re right about the problem: web pages tend to scale with the size of the organization serving them, not the size of the content. But this is the failure, not a defense.

It’s a big problem on mobile and the reason I read HN comments before the article.

> NYT employs 1,300 people

Re: The Bullshit Web

#34

Post by GuiA »

You know how building wider roads doesn’t improve commute times, as it simply encourages people to drive more? It’s that, but with bytes and bandwidth instead of cars and lanes.

That's the core insight. Higher availability of resources leads people to consume more of said resources - in tech, typically for more and more abstraction layers to deal with hardware of ever growing complexity to make the lives of developers easier, but at the cost of stagnation or regression for some metrics. See also: "Why Modern Computers Struggle to Match the Input Latency of an Apple IIe"

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computer...

Re: The Bullshit Web

#35

Post by lainga »

simmons wrote: post #25
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…

  renice 19 ?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#36

Post by mvdwoord »

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 and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough).

I disagree. They need journalists, and they need to find some way to monetize. Your argument implies there is no other way than to add user tracking. Sure, images take up space, but I refuse to believe the current way of the web is the only viable option.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#37

Post by olyjohn »

cascom wrote: post #7

you only need to use a wifi connection on an airplane to see how painful things are - it's like a time warp

The sad thing is that it's not a time warp. It's how a millions of people still browse the web today. I know people who are still on 1.5Mb DSL, who are only a couple miles from the city center. Not only is the line limited to 1.5Mb, but they are so deteriorated, that you can't get speeds over 768Kb. It's extremely common any time you get just a little tiny bit outside of the city.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#38

Post by stupidcar »

nostromo wrote: post #15

It's not just publishers. My current org uses SalesForce and it's frustratingly slow. Opening a single record takes several seconds as every single interface element is generated dynamically and then populated, seemingly one at a time. When it's finally done loading, you click on a dropdown, and then the dropdown just shows you a loading spinner, as your client asks the server what should be populated in the dropdown…

Saleforce's problem is that its presentation layer is a giant pile of legacy code, which can be fundamentally changed, because there's a gazillion extensions and customisations that rely on it working the way it currently does. Having worked a bit with it, there's absolutely nothing about it that "benefits" developers, anymore than having to maintain a VB6 app "benefits" developers.

Done right, a modern web app should be better for both developers and users. The one benefit of the crazy shit described in the article is that if you don't weigh down your page with a multiple MB of ad-network and analytics scripts, then it can be incredibly fast.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#39

Post by _louisr_ »

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…

This is both an appeal to people's universal appreciation of efficiency, and a weak denunciation of the modern web. Your argument is

1) that a website's value is the number of words on the page, and

2) that raw text is the highest value data that can be transmitted over the internet, and

3) that inefficiency and wastefulness of bits is a bad thing

First off, you need to defend your first two assumptions. Don't websites do a lot more than display text? Does HTML/markup not have a magnitude more value than raw text? And how exactly is being inefficient with something that is abundant a tautologically bad thing?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#40

Post by cheezymoogle »

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…

A random archive of the New York Times frontpage in 2005 is 300kb. Articles were probably comparable in size.

Are you honestly saying that the landscape of the internet and/or the staffing needs of the NY Times has changed so drastically that they actually needed a 22x increase in size to deliver fundamentally text-based reporting?

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