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

61–70 of 112 posts

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#61

Post by mike_hock »

aimor wrote: post #60

It doesn't stop there. There's still no good way to validate information on the internet. The internet, much like the real world, is full of untrue information, bad advice, and outright lies. Things that don't overcome this: Trusted experts, Wikipedia type citations, comment sections. Of those I think comment sections are the closest to being successful because they at least provide an open platform to raise doubt ab…

To the extent that they do. YouTube comment sections don't because they can be censored by the author at will.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#62

Post by ookblah »

Cyberdog wrote: post #10

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 kilo bits 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 i…

Yeah...56k felt plenty slow back then. Biggest jump for me that gave me that wow factor was when we went from 56k to a "cable modem".

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#63

Post by Cyberdog »

onion2k wrote: post #50
Cyberdog wrote: post #10

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 kilo bits 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 i…

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. A 10KB page at 14.4kbps takes 5 seconds to download. A 2MB page on a typical 30Mbps connection take less than 1s (ignoring improvements latency, changes in TCP frame size, better line conditions, etc). Web pages are definite…

Speaking factually, I guess you have to be correct and nostalgia is tainting my memories. Maybe my standards were also much lower then, so a ten-second page load was less offensive then than it is now.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#64

Post by Cyberdog »

Topgamer7 wrote: post #29
dilyevsky wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now We have very different memories then. I very clearly remember everything but very simple html taking forever to transfer over 56k connection

I just turned off image loading by default and would right click and select load image. Generally pages loaded great.

This was a killer feature in the iCab browser! I loved that ambitious little browser and used it for many years, and its ability to easily toggle image loading was one of the reasons.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#65

Post by Cyberdog »

someweirdperson wrote: post #49
mysterydip wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really curious what the "killer features" are of present-day Word compared to, say, Word 97.

It saves when the user wants to, not automatically without asking, saving even unintended accidential changes, and publishing them to others. It runs locally, not rendering badly in the browser. Saving to disk does not require navigation through 3 sub-menues.

> It runs locally, not rendering badly in the browser.

Not sure what you mean by this one - Word '97 didn't run in a browser either.

As for your other two features, I still don't see those as a 1000-fold improvement.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#66

Post by Cyberdog »

ineedasername wrote: post #24

>A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load The Hill is what finally pushed me to install an ad blocker. Before that it didn't bother me too much to get served ads etc that I filtered out of my awareness anyway, but The Hill was unusable. So, I installed an ad blocker and immediately realized how negligent I had been-- in terms of quality of web browsing experience-- in not doing so earlier. The Hill loaded n…

For what it's worth, AdGuard still seems to be holding its own against ad blocker blockers. Unlike other blockers, AdGuard is a paid service, but well worth it in my opinion and I'd recommend it in an instant.

The only place where AdGuard has been failing recently is blocking Twitch ads, unfortunately.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#67

Post by goodpoint »

onion2k wrote: post #50
Cyberdog wrote: post #10

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 kilo bits 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 i…

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. A 10KB page at 14.4kbps takes 5 seconds to download. A 2MB page on a typical 30Mbps connection take less than 1s (ignoring improvements latency, changes in TCP frame size, better line conditions, etc). Web pages are definite…

A 200-character text post was not 10KB. Tons of useful information was available in pure text.

Also, most webpages were loading in far less than 500ms on a newer modems, 56k.

More importantly, a lot of pure-text pages were focused on providing dense information that you would read for minutes. The load time was negligible in comparison.

Today information density on the web is the opposite.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#68

Post by at_a_remove »

javajosh wrote: post #30

Maybe if you paid for your content it would suck less. The problem is no-one wants to pay for content, so they have to pay for it with ads, which means satisfying the true customer, the advertiser. Google tried, for a while, non-cruft ads, but eventually the demand for more sensational advertising is what drives most of this cruft. Another driver, which is something front-end devs can do something about, is to stop s…

You think I wanted 10MB of fonts? Nope. Talk to Public Affair's design team.

You believe I wanted 200MB of images? Wrong. I wanted text, maybe some thumb-nails with pop-up images. But the photography group has to exist for a reason.

20MB bundles of Javascript? Sorry, but between the trackers marketing wanted and the fact that my boss' boss wants to have some hip new framework on his resume means I'm stuck when maybe just some jQuery would have done the job.

You are thinking about the web circa 1995, with the Webmaster being the master. That's been gone for a while. We implement what others demand, and they don't care if it is slow on other machines, they don't give a damn if it isn't accessible, and they could care less if the content is essentially empty, just pictures of people smiling because they chose this product. We're really not in charge of this unless this is a passion project personal site or we're some scrappy little startup.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#69

Post by jjtheblunt »

onion2k wrote: post #50
Cyberdog wrote: post #10

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 kilo bits 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 i…

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. A 10KB page at 14.4kbps takes 5 seconds to download. A 2MB page on a typical 30Mbps connection take less than 1s (ignoring improvements latency, changes in TCP frame size, better line conditions, etc). Web pages are definite…

yeah but the web on a campus intranet mid 90s was super fast. i think you both have valid points.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#70

Post by tomc1985 »

javajosh wrote: post #30

Maybe if you paid for your content it would suck less. The problem is no-one wants to pay for content, so they have to pay for it with ads, which means satisfying the true customer, the advertiser. Google tried, for a while, non-cruft ads, but eventually the demand for more sensational advertising is what drives most of this cruft. Another driver, which is something front-end devs can do something about, is to stop s…

You know what? We don't actually need all this content that is being pooped out of everyone. Because most of it's shit, and not worth the time to even watch. Yet people remain convinced that we need it, and some of you remain convinced that they need to pay for it. What a lie.

Burn it all, I say.

Post reply on HN