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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#511

Post by tjoff »

mkirklions wrote: post #491
nickjj wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think 3-10 seconds should be the bar. I spent years using a 14.4k / 28k / 56k modem. That was during the mid and late 90s. Browsing the web where you need to wait 3-10 seconds for everything to load is not a good user experience. It's a colossal waste of time, and today we have so many more reasons to view more pages compared to back then. We should strive for an improvement instead of trying to stick with li…

>Browsing the web where you need to wait 3-10 seconds for everything to load is not a good user experience. Im a lone owner of a website. I have enough time to accomplish one of 3 things before January >Finish my Finance App >update 200 pages to have pictures load based on screen type so you can load in 3 seconds instead of 6. >Collect and compile data to create 20 more pages, all of which my 3000 subscribers actuall…

So am I and I just don't buy it.

What on earth do people do to get over 1 second load time? Remember that you have to actively spend time to bloat a site.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#512

Post by Nasrudith »

closeparen wrote: post #95
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…

NYT needs to produce and recommend content that people find engaging to continue earning their subscription dollars. The idea that tracking is purely or primarily there to support a business model of selling user data is a strawman invented by self-righteous HNers. You need to know what parts of your product are effective to make it competitive in today’s marketplace.

That sounds like a case of acute metrics-itis personally - looking for things to measure as a yardstick while forgetting that you get what you measure for instead of the core of the business.

While it may give some insight does it give anything of meaning to know most people skim into the first few paragraphs before clicking away? Does it improve the writing quality or fact checking? Is it worth the risk of alienating customers over? To give a deliberately extreme and absurd example Victoria's Secret could hire people to stalk their customers to find out more about product failure conditions in the field but that would be a horrifying and stupid idea.

"Everybody is doing it." is a poor rationale for implementing a business practice.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#513

Post by freediver »

kingbirdy wrote: post #160
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…

The New York Times existed for 145 years from its founding in 1851 to the creation of its website in 1996, and it got by just fine without tracking pixels in all those years.

This is a fallacy. Humans got by just fine without smartphones, Internet, electricity for thousands of years. While you could do just fine without those things today it is impractical. Times change (pun intended).

Re: The Bullshit Web

#514

Post by VLM »

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…

Classic narrowcasting mistake that dying companies make.

Statista claims 2.3 million digital subscribers. NYT is trying to milk that 2.3M for everything they got, squeeze the last drops of blood from the stone while they still can.

That's a great way to go out of business, when 99.97% of the world population is not your customer and your squeezing labors are not going to encourage them to sign up.

If you hyperoptimize to squeeze every drop out of a small customer base, eventually you end up with something like legacy TV networks where 99% of the population won't watch a show even for free, and the tighter the target focus on an ever shrinking legacy audience, the smaller the audience gets, until the whole house of cards collapses.

Its similar to the slice of pie argument; there are many business strategies that make a pie slice "better" at the price of shrinking it, and eventually the paper-thin slice disappears from the market because the enormous number of the employees can't eat anymore, but that certainly will be the most hyperoptimized slice of pie ever made, right before it entirely disappears.

NYT is going to have a truly amazing spy product right before it closes.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#515

Post by freediver »

liquidwax wrote: post #231
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 first realised how heavy these pages are when I disabled javascript. Things load in the blink of an eye. \ Most\ pages work and the web remains largely usable.

bbc.co.uk will load just fine without JS and actually be more enjoyable (IMO) than JS version.

cnn.com fails miserably without JS.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#516

Post by krylon »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #496
krylon wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely use public transportation more often instead of walking or riding my bicycle than I would if I had to pay per ride.

That wasn’t my point though, you still only use it as much as you need it.

That is true. Point taken.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#517

Post by irrational »

gooseus wrote: post #307
overcast wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd start with the 100+KB PNG images. None of those pictures are complex, they can be compressed much more.

I put them all through ImageOptim, so not sure if those PNGs can compress anymore... I agree on those complexity graphs since they're actually scanned from Sean Carroll's book and edited in Pixelmator - if I was better with graphics I could probably recreate them as SVG or in an editor and make it only a couple kb. Same for the MinutePhysics screen grab, though I couldn't bring myself to attempt a poor recreation of…

Have you tried opening the image(s) in Photoshop and try outputting them at different resolutions and compression settings?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#518

Post by jancsika »

fwip wrote: post #345
jancsika wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So while you are fiercely criticizing sites which apparently understand and leverage the reality of zero-marginal cost digital data, you assume that data caps are a necessity in a digital world. Workers don't shovel extra connectivity into the towers when you go over your data cap. So why are you focusing on data flowing over the nearly-always-on connection you have through your data plan, rather than the bullshit te…

Data caps are like your city bus. You can buy a bulk number of rides per month at a discount, and everything over that is billed at a regular rate. The bus doesn't magically add more seats when you make extra trips on it, but it still costs more to take the bus three times a day than twice a week. Even though the marginal cost of your body on the bus is minimal, having the fee serves to reduce crowding (demand at tha…

> Data caps are like your city bus.

Hi fwip,

I don't have any knowledge about the economics or logistics of city bus lines.

I do understand something about Transfer Control Protocol, Javascript's event loop, and soft realtime performance in Linux.

Can you make an analogy between data caps and any of those concepts so I can understand what you're getting at?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#519

Post by StillBored »

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.

This is why I've never subscribed to cable TV. I'm not going to pay for the privilege of watching 20 mins of commercials an hour.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#520

Post by StillBored »

Its not just transferred content is literally minutes of CPU time on some webpages just to run the javascript. This isn't noticeable on a fast desktop, but try running some of these pages on atom class PCs or 5 year old phones (or for that matter put firefox on you phone and request the desktop site).
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