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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#131

Post by TeMPOraL »

notheguyouthink wrote: post #102
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…

> 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. Clearly they disagree. Or maybe you should let them know that they don't need that. To say it without sarcasm, what you feel you are entitled as a paying c…

> What you two agree upon, is the only thing that matters.

That's precisely why many of us use (and promote the use of) adblockers and filtering extensions.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#132

Post by ChuckMcM »

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 like this rant, you should go the next step:

All you need to 'fix' this is a fast loading news website that gets enough paid subscribers to earn enough margin from subscriptions that you can pay for a news staff, an office, and various overheads.

That is a longish way of saying that 99.9% of the overhead in any modern web site can be traced almost entirely to the mechanisms by which that web site is attempting to extract value from you for visiting/reading.

If people would visit with a 56K modem and deal with a 3 - 10 second page load, then that is the bar. And any spare bandwidth you might have is available for the web site to exploit in some way to generate revenue. The more bandwidth between you and them, the more ways they can come up with to exploit that bandwidth for additional surveillance, ads, or analytics that will get them more money.

When you are the customer, which to say it is your purchasing of a subscription or articles is the only revenue the site needs in order to survive, then the things that retain you as a customer have the highest priority (like fast page load times, minimal bandwidth usage).

But when you are a data cow, a random bit of insight into a picture much bigger than you can comprehend, a pixel in a much larger tapestry, or an action droplet in a much larger river of action. Well then there isn't really any incentive to make your life better, as long as the machine we have milking you for data can get even a couple of molecules more of that precious data milk without scaring you out of the barn. Well we'll build right up to that limit.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#133

Post by btrettel »

slig wrote: post #97
eterm wrote: post #86

I've been thinking about building either a local proxy or firefox addon that puts everything into "first-party only" mode unless whitelisted. It would probably break the web (at least the genuine parts) less than disabling javascript wholesale which is just too awkward, but it would vastly cut down on the "bullshit" as this article calls it. It would need some care, for example it would probably have to work from roo…

uMatrix / uBlock seems to do what you want.

RequestPolicy is another addon which does this, but it doesn't work on the latest Firefox.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#135

Post by theyinwhy »

soared wrote: post #24

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,…

Every person I know is using an ad blocker so I guess they do care. And yes, publishers care as well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/05/27...

Re: The Bullshit Web

#136

Post by TeMPOraL »

foepys wrote: post #109
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.

For the first, it's sufficient enough to just look at the number of page requests. For the second, I never got explained to me how UX analysis really works for news sites. Isn't it enough to put 2 or 3 people in a room and show them a few variations of the UI? There isn't really much to publishing text, images, and a few graphs. Graphs are a very well explored field, I don't think you can learn more about them by jus…

I suspect there's lot of bullshitting happening around "UX analysis", with third-party "experts" offering analyses which may, or may not, show something significant. As long as everyone in the chain can convince their customer/superior that their work is useful, the money will flow, whether or not the work is actually useful.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#137

Post by zajd »

smolder wrote: post #123
zajd wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reso…

It's because they use systems that identify the client via js to deliver the most "expensive" ad possible. It's complete garbage of course, Google/Facebook should be held liable for what they advertise, not run massive automated systems full of fraud. If Google delivers malware they shouldn't be able to throw their hands up and go "well, section 230!".

Re: The Bullshit Web

#138

Post by gooseus »

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 can't agree more with the points you make, I've spent a decent amount of time and effort reducing the overhead of my blog, for example - https://goose.us/thoughts/on-the-purpose-of-life/

That page includes images and "embedded" youtube videos, but loads 454kb of 3,187 words with 10 requests in 450-600ms - if anyone has any suggestions on how to reduce that further, I'd love to hear.

Going to bookmark that txti.es service for the future, definitely seems useful for publishing simple content without needing to fit it into a blog theme.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#139

Post by chickenfries »

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…

You want to compare plain text to a newspaper, which even in paper form, people expect to contain pictures and advertisements.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#140

Post by TeMPOraL »

smolder wrote: post #123
zajd wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reso…

The way it's implemented has several "benefits":

- It externalizes resource usage - the waste happens on users' machines. Who cares that it adds up to meaningful electricity consumption anyway?

- It makes it easier for marketing people and developers to independently work on the site. Developers can optimize, marketers can waste all that effort by including yet another third-party JS.

- It supports ad auctions and other services in the whole adtech economy.

- You don't have to do much analytics yourself, as the third party provides cute graphs ideal for presenting to management.

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