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I can only think that modern front end development has failed

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Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#71

Post by hyperman1 »

leephillips wrote: post #40

I am not an expert chef. I can cook pretty well, and my guests enjoy my food. But it doesn’t compare to what a professional chef can do. I am not an expert abdominal surgeon. If we are in Antarctica and your appendix becomes inflamed, I will try to save you by cutting it out. But you will probably die. I am not an expert front-end developer. I make sites for myself, for others, and have even been paid for it a few ti…

There is something very apt in your first line: A lot of sites suffer from too many cooks in the kitchen.

If every department proves its worth by claiming space on the front page, customer experience will be the last concern. That's before someone notices how giving content away is not a monetization strategy. Then add the siren song of 'only one more script' for marketing data,even if nobody has a clue about what to do with that data.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#72

Post by leephillips »

ergot_vacation wrote: post #67
leephillips wrote: post #40

I am not an expert chef. I can cook pretty well, and my guests enjoy my food. But it doesn’t compare to what a professional chef can do. I am not an expert abdominal surgeon. If we are in Antarctica and your appendix becomes inflamed, I will try to save you by cutting it out. But you will probably die. I am not an expert front-end developer. I make sites for myself, for others, and have even been paid for it a few ti…

Your sites are better at being tools ordinary human beings can use to their own benefit. They are (probably) terrible at generating money via ad revenue and tricking people into buying subscriptions that are then nearly impossible to cancel. Making a site to share info and have fun is easy. Nearly anyone can do it. Making a site to actively exploit people in the most intense way possible while still being legal(ish)…

Exactly. But I am using the measure of quality that I think is relevant. We call a chef good when we like the food, not when he finds a way to enrich a fast food chain.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#73

Post by brayhite »

throwawayfire wrote: post #45
notjustanymike wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Just like music, there was a LOT of trash web development back in the day as well. Sites built with tables in dreamweaver best viewed on netscape navigator at 800x600 with animated gifs bogging the download speed existed long ago. What we have today are the same problems with a new…

> Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Not "just" survival bias. I think it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000. As the genre has matured, popular/commercially successful music has depended more and more on fewer and fewer producers. Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists: the US Billboard Hot…

> Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists

Source?

I reckon every decade had a handful of artists dominate the charts, so it wasn’t unheard of at all to see multiple chart toppers by the same artists at any given time. In fact, given the gatekeepers of popular music largely were concentrated around radio DJs and the “industry machine” of record labels, I’d hypothesize there’s a larger on average number of unique artists in the top 100 since the 2000s than before.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#74

Post by okareaman »

csmiller wrote: post #49
okareaman wrote: post #14

I recently lost my internet provider, so while I wait for a new one I'm tethering from my phone. The Verizon unlimited data plan actually throttles me to modem speed, about 56k, so it's actually not unlimited. Anyway, it's been interesting to judge various websites by how fast they load at that speed. Hacker News comes right up. Twitter is acceptable. Facebook is terrible and often does not even load at all. The same…

I believe Twitter uses React? Although it’s possible that Twitter successfully served you Twitter-Lite while FB may have mistakenly sent the full version.

I just checked. You're right. So maybe it isn't React but something else Facebook is doing.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#75

Post by bryanlarsen »

coldtea wrote: post #65
notjustanymike wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Just like music, there was a LOT of trash web development back in the day as well. Sites built with tables in dreamweaver best viewed on netscape navigator at 800x600 with animated gifs bogging the download speed existed long ago. What we have today are the same problems with a new…

> I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Well, if the top 100 tracks from, say, 1961 to 2021 progressively get less musically diverse, with simpler chords, less harmonies, less timbral variety, lesser melodies, more repeatition, less dynamics, less genre variety, more infantile lyrics (something that has been studied and…

To be fair, you have to adjust for the relevance of top 100. In the past the top 100 was the only thing most people were exposed to because that's all the radio played. Today Spotify and Youtube and their recommendation algorithms make the top 100 almost completely irrelevant.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#76

Post by Forgeties79 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #68
throwawayfire wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Not "just" survival bias. I think it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000. As the genre has matured, popular/commercially successful music has depended more and more on fewer and fewer producers. Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists: the US Billboard Hot…

I think you've got that completely backwards. 2000 is about the time that the "long tail" exploded, where Youtube and Spotify made non-top 40 music a lot easier to find. In consequence there is a lot more really good music available today than there was pre-internet and it's a lot easier to find. It's not on the radio, but that's always been the case.

Exactly. One only has to look at the myriad of tv shows, video games, movies, etc. to see that we have more quality options than ever and are seeing even more niche, but commercially successful content. There’s more static too, but there’s a lot of good out there.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#77

Post by okareaman »

quonn wrote: post #60
okareaman wrote: post #14

I recently lost my internet provider, so while I wait for a new one I'm tethering from my phone. The Verizon unlimited data plan actually throttles me to modem speed, about 56k, so it's actually not unlimited. Anyway, it's been interesting to judge various websites by how fast they load at that speed. Hacker News comes right up. Twitter is acceptable. Facebook is terrible and often does not even load at all. The same…

After minification and compression, React is about 100kb and can be cached for a long time. With all the images, videos on social media etc. it seems rather small in terms of bandwidth.

I'm not counting images and videos because all sites have that problem, but things like clicking on the notifications icon and then waiting for it too load and it never does so I have to give up and go back to my phone.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#79

Post by okareaman »

cjbconnor wrote: post #56
okareaman wrote: post #14

I recently lost my internet provider, so while I wait for a new one I'm tethering from my phone. The Verizon unlimited data plan actually throttles me to modem speed, about 56k, so it's actually not unlimited. Anyway, it's been interesting to judge various websites by how fast they load at that speed. Hacker News comes right up. Twitter is acceptable. Facebook is terrible and often does not even load at all. The same…

You can bypass the speed restrictions by decreasing the TTL on your machine by 1 [0], I tested it and it worked perfectly. [0] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/226580/how-is-ve...

Hah! This is awesome, I'll give it a try. Thanks.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#80

Post by michaelt »

okareaman wrote: post #69
jasonpeacock wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search for "Facebook Lite", it's their lightweight frontend for lower-bandwidth connections.

It appears to be an app for a phone? I have no throttling problem on the phone in case that wasn't clear, but I don't care to look at the small screen and want to use my desktop.

I think they mean https://m.facebook.com - a lightweight web version.
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