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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#181

Post by wuliwong »

blub wrote: post #75
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 t…

I don't understand how you are relating this to the tragedy of the commons other than saying that because something has a reason it doesn't preclude it from being something.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#182

Post by kup0 »

_louisr_ wrote: post #39
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 websit…

#3 is an interesting thought. So when something is abundant, inefficiency and wastefulness are fine?

When it comes to bits, abundant to who? Those who can afford said abundance? Certainly not to those with bandwidth caps and slow internet access.

Reminds me of a cartoon I saw once: "What if climate change turns out to be a hoax and we end up making the world better for nothing!"

Since when is doing something efficiently and non-wastefully not a good idea for its own sake?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#183

Post by kaitari »

This phenomenon is not limited to BS web. Back when virtualization was the new wave, everyone raved at the money/space/energy savings from running multiple virtual machines on a single server. It was great. Then what happened? Many folks went nuts, spinning up VMs for any and everything, and suddenly needed to spend more money on more physical servers to run more VMs, and an infinite loop.

Bloat from convenience.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#184

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: The Bullshit Web

#185

Post by rhizome »

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…

"[B]usiness was improved" is doing a lot of work in there.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#186

Post by carapace »

agumonkey wrote: post #150

I've read others comment on the lack of empathy for publishers. 10$ that the author doesn't blame them. That said, this is a weird situation, to which I became allergic. To the point I started r/vanillahtml to stack websites that gave me that feeling of fat-free moment. One thing you should do, is install dillo, and enjoy the web. It's usually faster than elinks, chrome whatever. Sure you'll get horrendous css render…

Dillo! https://www.dillo.org/

I mentally partition the web into Dillo-compatible and -incompatible subsets. :-)

Re: The Bullshit Web

#187

Post by ryandrake »

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…

The tons (and growing) of normal everyday users using ad blockers and other annoyance-reducing web plugins is evidence against this.

Also, we are not talking about the expense of “micro-optimization.” We are talking about not deliberately spending the time to add all this BS into the software. I guarantee it costs less to publish a text/plain document than a HTML/CS/JavaScript trash fire.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#188

Post by ilaksh »

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.

It contains Chromium in it's entirety, which is a contemporary full featured browser, which is actually in a way a complete operating system.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#189

Post by jerf »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #42
moolcool wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why the slack desktop client is so popular. It's almost no different from the web client, but eats more RAM if you already have Chrome open. Just pin Slack in a tab and save your memory

> 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.)

Web Slack does system notifications. You may have to turn them on explicitly because it requires a permission (can't recall if you do or if it prompts you, but it is something you have to enable), but if it's working in my Linux browser I'm assuming it works in Windows and OSX. I don't know if that would also integrate with in-dock notifications or not. If so, making it a viable alt-tab target would just be running it in a separate browser window, which should still net many fewer used resources than a separate app.

If you are happy, no problem. I'm posting for general info.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#190

Post by simsla »

komali2 wrote: post #146
ChuckMcM wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Hilariously, the New York times tries both: you get five or so article reads (with shitloads of tracking), and then you have to pay to read more per month. But if you're paying, the pages don't load any different. You're paying to be mined.

Not really. You're paying for the additional content. The tracking is external to that deal.

I'm not saying I like it that way, but you're conflating two unrelated things.

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