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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#161

Post by cheezymoogle »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #136
foepys wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's one of the fundamental problems in tech today, namely:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Re: The Bullshit Web

#162

Post by TeMPOraL »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #152
TeMPOraL wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence the rant mentioning Molochian economy, under which we operate. And that reference explains in depth why this is a very hard problem. I like the rant too. Except maybe the bit about sending content at the speed of humans - I for one would like to take lightweight, bullshit-free content as fast as it can be sent, to pipe it to further processing on my end, in the never-ending quest to automate things in my life.

I mean, if you're just reducing the content even further, just request that they make the reduction possible server-side and everybody wins.

I was more thinking about e.g. running a script to fetch 3 different lightweight sites, run some personal code on it and combine the data. If the script would spend 99.9% of its time waiting on IO because of "human speeds", I wouldn't be too happy.

That said, I would be willing to bite the bullet and accept speed limits across the board if it resulted in lean web.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#163

Post by Rjevski »

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?

Or just you know, not do anything that would require consent in the first place. If you have to ask for consent you’re already doing some of the bullshit outlined in the above article.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#164

Post by pavel_lishin »

nrhk wrote: post #108
pavel_lishin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know why the slack desktop client is so popular. In-dock notifications and system notifications are my reasons, as well as a dedicated window I can alt-tab to instead of tabbing through browser windows, then navigating to the Slack tab. (I realize that for some people, "hiding" Slack in a pinned tab may be a feature.)

Just open in a separate chrome window?

In OS X, if I alt-tab over to Chrome, it will focus on whatever window I had in focus last; I'd still have to Command-Tilde to find the Slack one.

I know, it's a minor kvetch. But it's a minor kvetch I can solve with a gig of RAM.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#165

Post by lstodd »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #10
edhelas wrote: post #3

It's not only the web anymore. What about the desktop Slack that can take up to 1Gb of RAM for a "simple" chat client.

I'd be saying "Yeah!" along with you, but that client is also a video chat and audio calling app, not just text and images. There's bloatware out there, and this may even qualify, but it isn't just text chat. (Why would you use the desktop client for text chat anyway?)

audio/video work fine in chromium.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#166

Post by thecombjelly »

I do all my browsing with uMatrix with everything blocked by default but first party CSS. It really makes the internet a more enjoyable place to be. Pages load much, much faster and it's often easier to find and read the content. On mobile it saves a boatload in bandwidth costs. For example, loading a NYTimes article takes 90KB and DOMContentLoaded is in 69ms. Truly much of the other stuff loaded is bullshit because a significant amount of the web is more usable without all the crap.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#167

Post by chickenfries »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #153
chickenfries wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it’s not the NYTs fault that plain text compresses well compared to jpgs. Also, is a world where he NYT is subscriber only really preferable?

This is a textbook definition of a false dichotomy. There are other distribution models for digital news services. There are other methods for transmitting digital content. It's not an either/or situation.

Fair enough but these rants on HN about publishers never seem to contain any examples of publications that are both successful and delivering pages that weigh scarcely more than their plain text equivalent.

I think you invite the “false dichotomy” by making the comparison between plain text Moby Dick and the front page of one of the most successful newspapers in the world in 2018. I agree with many of your points but find the way you make your argument to be full of comparisons of apples and oranges while avoiding proposing any kind of solution.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#168

Post by krrrh »

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 support your effort to make Moby-Dicks the football-field-like unit of measurement for text-focused data. It’s close enough to the 1.44 MB floppy disk to handle easy mental conversion of historical rants, and half of the people reading this have probably never held one of those. I still remember downloading a text version of a 0.9 Moby-Dick book from some FTP site and carrying it around on a floppy so I could read it on whatever computer was handy.

That aside, the most shocking part of your analysis is how inefficient the nytimes was at caching resources for your reload.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#169

Post by mpax »

It’s not just the web, software in general is getting increasingly bloated.

Not in features, but in more and more layers of abstractions.

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