The Bullshit Web • Hacker News Board

Re: The Bullshit Web

#121

Post by goatlover » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 7:29 PM UTC

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).

This just seems like such an abuse of what the web was meant to be. I can imagine the horror people in the 90s would have experienced if they new what JS was going to be used for when perusing news sites.

Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better keeping the web as a document platform without any scripting, and creating a separate one for apps.

Anyway, an alternative model news sites could use is to let users choose which content they want to pay for. That's a way to track which content users prefer.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#122

Post by StyloBill » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 7:31 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #113

scarygliders wrote: post #105

> People really hate autoplaying video Yes, this a billion-fold! Every single newspaper site I peruse uses autoplaying video. The experience goes like this: Load up the front page of newspaper site. Select an article of interest and click on its link. Article loads. A video player pops into existence on the lower right hand corner of the page, and the video starts playing. Most annoying. However it gets more egregiou…

The video is not actually the problem (for me). It's the audio. Why can't my browser (Chrome) still not give me appropriate control over audio?

It should be better in the near future:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/3/17251104/google-chrome-66-...

Re: The Bullshit Web

#123

Post by smolder » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 7:32 PM UTC

zajd wrote: post #103

soared wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the content is directly related to user behavior. If they see no one reads the style section, they'll cut it and move resources to financial news. If they didn't have tracking they'd never know that, be wasting resources and having a comparatively inferior product. They can't do UX anaylsis, nothing.

You can do all of those analytics server side, there's no reason to deliver it via JS and have the client do the computation. You're already sending all the required info to track that sort of thing via the request itself.

It's amazing to me that no one out there seems to do server-local handling of ads, either... If you put ads directly into your page instead of relying on burdensome external systems, suddenly blocking isn't a thing anymore. ALL of the functionality supposedly needed for analytics and an ad-driven business model can happen server side, without the page becoming sentient and loading a billion scripts and scattered resources, with the one exception being filtering out headless browsers. If external systems need to be communicated with, most of that can happen before or after the fact of that page load. Advertising and analytics is implemented in the most lazy, user hostile way possible on the majority of sites.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#124

Post by snarf21 » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 7:32 PM UTC

cocoa19 wrote: post #98

Another point for the bullshit web: The GDPR cookie consent notification. I really hate clicking on those notifications to make them go away. Designers, can you please just add a non-obtrusive link, instead of a pop up that covers half my browser screen?

Not a design problem, ".... only that you conspicuously provide the option for obtaining informed consent ...."

The intention is that it must be obtrusive. The company has a choice between annoying you and mitigating risk.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#125

Post by duxup » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 7:33 PM UTC

megaman22 wrote: post #112

duxup wrote: post #53

Things are different now. When I was on a modem... pictures, almost any, were bullshit as far as being big and annoying to download. A lot of the time I hated them. Nobody thinks about pictures that way anymore. I suspect that goes for a lot of the bullshit listed in that article. I'm no fan of tracking or auto play videos, but web applications are a thing now and the people visiting sites, building them, and paying…

Pictures are still a huge pain in the ass on mobile connections. Try looking at Facebook or Instagram or Twitter on a flaky 2G connection. Although you don't get to see them stream in line by line like you used to in the good old days - they just take forever to download a muddy blurred version of the actual image first as a placeholder.

I hear ya.

Even better when you see what seems like a high rez picture that is sized small and you click to see it better ... oh crap it is starting over downloading again ... and I'm 99% sure the pic was already there before. (granted it may not have been high res but damn it it was close enough)

Re: The Bullshit Web

#126

Post by makecheck » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 7:33 PM UTC

We have a ridiculously-backwards model on the web where you essentially pay for what you use (via your data plan, and via forced ads prior to promised content) without having any way to know in advance what it will end up costing you to display content. Heck, you don’t even know if the content will display correctly after all that loading. Worse, there are many ways to trigger loads accidentally, meaning you may want none of the content but you end up paying for it through your data plan.

We desperately need absolute maximums enforceable in the browser, reversing the firehose. I want to opt your site in to more data use, after I trust your site. And I expect sites to work within my limit or not receive visits.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#127

Post by RileyJames » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 7:33 PM UTC

I use the “clean reader mode” (in safari, the small three stripe button next to the https lock in the address bar) very often to remove the clutter.

But this still means I downloaded all the unnecessary crap. Which is primarily annoying because of the delay in loading (crappy reception is the norm outside of Canadian cities).

Where as hacker news loads nearly instantly.

Is there a good alternative browser for iOS that avoids downloading JS, video, bloat?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#128

Post by excalibur » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC

throwawaymath wrote: post #31

soared wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I need to like this comment more than my single upvote allows.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#129

Post by lightswitch05 » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC

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…

AMP is terrible. I flat out block it in my hosts file and haven't missed it yet. Its pretty much just used for advertising anyway. Or for 'news' articles that are thinly disguised ads

Re: The Bullshit Web

#130

Post by goatlover » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 7:35 PM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #38

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 shoul…

> Done right, a modern web app should be better for both developers and users.

Right, and you also don't need to make a text-based site an SPA or use any frontend framework. The web was made for documents, so no need for those kinds of sites to be apps.