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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#71

Post by isleyaardvark »

ukulele wrote: post #45

Unpopular opinion alert: Maybe the "bullshit" is only bullshit to you, the thorny tech-savvy reader. Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and their business was improved by adding fonts, stylesheets, API calls, spinners, scripts, high-res images, and god knows what else. Maybe speed improvements are not important beyond a certain point. Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. Maybe micro-optimization…

I'm sure plenty of sites improve their bottom line by implementing dark UX patterns as well, it doesn't make it any less bullshit.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#72

Post by isoprophlex »

ukulele wrote: post #45

Unpopular opinion alert: Maybe the "bullshit" is only bullshit to you, the thorny tech-savvy reader. Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and their business was improved by adding fonts, stylesheets, API calls, spinners, scripts, high-res images, and god knows what else. Maybe speed improvements are not important beyond a certain point. Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. Maybe micro-optimization…

It's bullshit allright. Thousands of cpu hours, megabytes and dollars wasted on some user spying turdheap the marketing guys NEEDED to put in an app, 'to track user behaviour'. What a euphemism. Without spilling too many beans, we're using a solution that records an actual movie of the user using our app, each time a session is started.

In six months, the only thing we learned: half of the users that finish setting up don't continue to use the app. We could have learned that from server side logs without invading user privacy.

Another story: four employees of a large corporate running target marketing based on behaviour of customers logged in to their website.

Added revenue versus control: 60.000 yearly. Sub-0.1% conversation rates. The corp had been running these campaigns for at least five years.

My personal stories. Anecdata, I know.

There is SO MUCH BULLSHIT.

Edit: to clarify the first example, it's not a movie using the front facing camera, 'just' a screen grab

Re: The Bullshit Web

#73

Post by eterm »

pasta wrote: post #32

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…

> framework that takes 200ms to init

Which framework(s) take 200ms to init?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#74

Post by [deleted] »

koolba wrote: post #56
throwawaymath wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Interestingly if you pay them, and thus are logged in when you view an article, then they can better track you. In contrast if you never sign up, disable JS, and periodically clear your cookies, then the entire site works fine and none of the third party trackers work. At best they can link your browser user agent and IP to a hit on the server side.

[deleted]

Re: The Bullshit Web

#75

Post by blub »

ukulele wrote: post #45

Unpopular opinion alert: Maybe the "bullshit" is only bullshit to you, the thorny tech-savvy reader. Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and their business was improved by adding fonts, stylesheets, API calls, spinners, scripts, high-res images, and god knows what else. Maybe speed improvements are not important beyond a certain point. Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. Maybe micro-optimization…

There are many logical reasons why various websites are so bloated. Certainly the market realities and web development culture play a role.

That doesn't change the fact that the end result is bullshit, though. The tragedy of the commons is still a tragedy.

I don't have a solution for commercial news organisations. If they can't completely subsidise their web presence through other means, it's pretty much guaranteed that the advertising pressures will turn it into crap.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#76

Post by pdonis »

nawitus wrote: post #70

Most websites are not optimized well because optimization costs money and software engineers are expensive. There probably is not a market failure here.

Most web sites send a lot of data that is not for me, the user; it's for the website, to serve ads or track me or do other things that I either don't care about or would much rather they didn't do. The website had to make a conscious choice to include all that stuff; it's not as though it was already there and would have to be optimized out.

In other words, the problem is the most websites are optimized, but not for their users.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#77

Post by pc86 »

Pete_D wrote: post #61
pc86 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing the raw text of a fiction novel to the code of a website is a pretty asinine comparison, honestly.

Maybe you'd prefer comparing the code of a website to the amount of useful content on the website, which OP also did. Taking "I'm downloading 100mb worth of stuff (83 Moby-Dicks) to read 72kb worth of plaintext" at face value, we could also say that 0.072% of the data transferred is useful, or, equivalently, that 99.928% of it is crap.

You don't have to download the typography of a physical book but it still plays a huge role in the readability and enjoyment of it. So I guess the typography of websites is "crap" because it has to be downloaded?

It's a ridiculous apples-and-hammers comparison thinly veiled as an intelligent critique.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#78

Post by yathern »

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 just loaded up a nytimes[1] article too - and only weighed in at 1.0MB. For a 1000 word article. Subsequent reloads dropped it to ~1000KB. I don't think that's too bad, considering there are images in there as well.

Now of course, I'm running an ad blocker. I assume the remaining MB that you noticed had come from advertising sources. In which case, bloat isn't the issue, ads are.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/politics/facebook-poli...

Re: The Bullshit Web

#79

Post by [deleted] »

ukulele wrote: post #45

Unpopular opinion alert: Maybe the "bullshit" is only bullshit to you, the thorny tech-savvy reader. Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and their business was improved by adding fonts, stylesheets, API calls, spinners, scripts, high-res images, and god knows what else. Maybe speed improvements are not important beyond a certain point. Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. Maybe micro-optimization…

[deleted]

Re: The Bullshit Web

#80

Post by pdonis »

Alex3917 wrote: post #55

Yes, we should definitely go back to the days where there was only one stylesheet per page and the web wasn't accessible to those with visual impairments. Being blind is clearly just a lifestyle choice, and we shouldn't be catering to the blind agenda. /s In all seriousness, most of the problem with bloat is on the mobile side. But in another ~1.25 years iPhones will have enough advanced LTE functionality that they w…

> we should definitely go back to the days where there was only one stylesheet per page and the web wasn't accessible to those with visual impairments. Being blind is clearly just a lifestyle choice, and we shouldn't be catering to the blind agenda.

How does bogging down pages with ads and tracking scripts and other bloat help the visually impaired? If anything, it should make things even worse for them than for sighted users, since it's easier (not easy, but easier) to navigate by eye to the part of the page you actually want to read than it is to skip over all the cruft using an accessibility add-on.

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