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The Bullshit Web

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201–210 of 568 posts

Re: The Bullshit Web

#201
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You may be interested in an app called HyperSwitch. It lets you tab between individual windows of each app! There’s also opt-tab which will cycle through individual app windows.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#202
post #21

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).

Nonsense. I subscribe to the NYT so that I can read the news. Nothing about that necessitates tracking which users read which articles.

If the NYT uses page view data for anything other than statistics for their advertising partners, it's a shame. I don't want the NYT to tailor write their articles to maximize page views, time spent, or any other vanity statistic; if I felt like reading rage bait fed to me by an algorithm personally customized for all my rage buttons, there is plenty of that elsewhere.

NYT's differentiating factor is that they are one of the few businesses left that pays people to conduct actual journalism. If they give up on that, then I imagine their customers will just go to buzzfeed or wherever.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#203
post #21

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…

> Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. NYT employs 1,300 people.

Totally irrelevant. Why should the number of employees in the company have any bearing on the size or cost of the product? Ford has 5x as many employees as Tesla. Should their cars be 5x as big or 5x more expensive?

> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product

They may want this but they don’t need it. They successfully produced their product in the past without it.

> If Moby Dick was being rewritten and optimized every single day it would be a few mb.

Irrelevant and likely false. If anything, books and other text media tend to get smaller after subsequent editing and revising.

> A better comparison would by Moby Dick to the physical NYT newspaper.

Comparing a digital text product (Moby Dick) with a digital text product (a NYT article) is as close as it gets.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#204

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 know how many people here read usenet or were on old mailing lists. You could have removed a some hard edges in usability and everything would have been connected to phones with monochrome text displays back in the nineties already. They didn't even provide decent email experience. But instead we got the technology developing through some ringtone stuff advertised on TV. I guess it's something that you can in…

That's one of the wildest things! We had the technological capacity to run Unix systems with several hundred users simultaneously and access at the speed of thought with 26kbps modems back in 1992, complete with instant messaging and personal directories! What happened?!

Re: The Bullshit Web

#205
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Try Chrome web app mode: https://superuser.com/questions/33548/starting-google-chrome...

Re: The Bullshit Web

#206
post #77
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've already downloaded everything I need for perfect typography. I can apply it to most websites with Firefox's Reader Mode. Websites cannot possibly improve on this, because the best and most legible typography is the typography you're most familiar with. I don't care about branding or image or whatever bullshit "designers" use to justify their jobs. Web fonts and CSS have negative value to me. I disable them as far as possible.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree in theory. However, I haven't noticed the slowness in their website and the ads are well done and blend in with the webpage. They may have to redesign/rearchitect their whole website to get what you are asking for. It should be noted that traditional newspapers include ads alongside news content and no one complains. In fact people used to sift through the Sunday NYT simply for the ads.

Tbh they could email me articles plaintext and I'd happily hand over my money.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#208
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…

> What I think is difficult is that most people think a website should be an experience.

People on the delivering end. Not the users. The users just want to get the content they came in for, and to continue with their lives. This "website is experience" is a combination of vanity and trying to monetize users better by playing on their emotions.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#209
One bright-side to the end of Moore's law is that--until some new computational breakthrough comes along--we are at a web bullshit plateau.

Just think of the stuff they could pull off with ten more years of speed-doublings...

Re: The Bullshit Web

#210

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…

What do you mean by "bloat is on the mobile side"?.

The problem with bloat. That is, web pages are just much slower to download and render on mobile than on desktop. E.g. a page that takes less than a second to load on desktop can easily take ten seconds to load on mobile. But two or three years from now, that same page will load in less than a second also.
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