Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Bullshit Web (2018)

pxlnv.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 112 posts

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#3

Post by andrewvc »

What’s the point of loading a page in 500ms if the real problem people are dealing with is a glut of content and fierce competition for our attention.

I wonder if a slower web might be a better web in many ways.

Reduced page load speeds increase engagement. What if I want to decrease engagement with the internet?

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#4

Post by gennarro »

I don’t really understand the complaint. If you don’t like the CNN website, don’t go to CNN or use CNN lite, which has been well documented on HN. No one is forcing you to visit the site.

Also, blocking webfonts is trivially easy at this stage so if you have specific complaints then you can take matters into your own hands with little more than a flip of a setting.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#6

Post by AussieWog93 »

andrewvc wrote: post #3

What’s the point of loading a page in 500ms if the real problem people are dealing with is a glut of content and fierce competition for our attention. I wonder if a slower web might be a better web in many ways. Reduced page load speeds increase engagement. What if I want to decrease engagement with the internet?

Just did a quick Google, looks like plugins for this exist on both Firefox and Chrome!

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#7

Post by shrimp_emoji »

andrewvc wrote: post #3

What’s the point of loading a page in 500ms if the real problem people are dealing with is a glut of content and fierce competition for our attention. I wonder if a slower web might be a better web in many ways. Reduced page load speeds increase engagement. What if I want to decrease engagement with the internet?

What if I want to shop for my groceries without waiting 10 seconds for Costco's app to load and then NOT have the "Grocery" button jump up half a page just as I'm about to tap it because a deals section below it just got finished dynamically loading?

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#8

Post by thekingofrome »

gennarro wrote: post #4

I don’t really understand the complaint. If you don’t like the CNN website, don’t go to CNN or use CNN lite, which has been well documented on HN. No one is forcing you to visit the site. Also, blocking webfonts is trivially easy at this stage so if you have specific complaints then you can take matters into your own hands with little more than a flip of a setting.

The complaint is more about the general direction that the web is taking.

It's all well and good saying "just don't use X website", but most news sites have plenty of features that are either annoying or outright disrespectful to the user.

That aside though, somebody who likes articles published by CNN has good reason to complain, because the things they like are being filled with bloat/are annoying to access.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#9

Post by LinuxBender »

andrewvc wrote: post #3

What’s the point of loading a page in 500ms if the real problem people are dealing with is a glut of content and fierce competition for our attention. I wonder if a slower web might be a better web in many ways. Reduced page load speeds increase engagement. What if I want to decrease engagement with the internet?

That's easy enough to simulate on Linux if you want to try. Replace eth0 with your wan interface. Re-paste the "del" lines to clear the added latency. If testing this on a remote host I would suggest adding a cron job to run the "del" lines every 10 minutes. I am typing this from memory so it may not work quite right. Use "tc -s -p qdisc" to get the packet statistics. All of these commands need to be run as root or with sudo.

    # outbound qdisc
    tc qdisc del dev eth0 root    > /dev/null 2>&1
    tc qdisc del dev eth0 ingress > /dev/null 2>&1
    tc qdisc add dev eth0 root netem delay 250ms 20ms

    # inbound qdisc
    modprobe ifb numifbs=1 && ip link set dev ifb0 up
    tc qdisc del dev ifb0 root    > /dev/null 2>&1
    tc qdisc del dev ifb0 ingress > /dev/null 2>&1
    tc qdisc add dev ifb0 root netem delay 250ms 20ms
250ms 20ms means add a latency of 250ms with a variability of 20ms. This test will break at some point but one could test the impact of this using a speed test [1][2]

[1] - https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest#

[2] - https://fast.com/

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#10

Post by Cyberdog »

It's an old, old argument, but very true. My first Internet-capable computer had a 14.4k modem - that's a theoretical speed of 14,000 kilobits per second. But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now, and that was before ad blockers were really a thing. And some of the technologies that we have now but not then could theoretically have made sites load even faster; PNG instead of GIF, MozJPEG compression for JPEGs, SVG for vector graphics, CSS for reducing repeated code and getting rid of table-based layouts, etc.

But, obviously, the web hasn't gotten faster, because the increased bandwidth has been filled with increased nonsense, and browsers now download 2MB of nonsense to show a 200-character text post. It's this sort of nonsense that is partly the genesis for ideas like Gemini, a return to Gopher, or my own KyuWeb; limit the capabilities of the medium to vastly improve its speed and legibility.

This sort of thing isn't exclusive to the web, either. Is an old late-'90s version of Microsoft Word that could run on a machine with 4MB of RAM really a thousand times better than one from today that requires 4GB?

I really love the web, but sometimes it does piss me off a bit.

Post reply on HN