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The Bullshit Web (2018)

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Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#91

Post by EricE »

mike_hock wrote: post #61
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.

>they can be censored by the author at will

YouTube's censorship is even more problematic.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#92

Post by wildrhythms »

tomrod wrote: post #58

What a great article. I wish I had a scalpel I could use to cut away the webcruft that comes from every direction. Setting up a pihole and turning off JS can help, I reckon, but there is still tons of cruft that simply doesn't belong.

I wish browsers universally established a hard resource budget for webpages. Cap it at 2MB runtime memory usage and let's see what happens.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#93

Post by dredmorbius »

wildrhythms wrote: post #92
tomrod wrote: post #58

What a great article. I wish I had a scalpel I could use to cut away the webcruft that comes from every direction. Setting up a pihole and turning off JS can help, I reckon, but there is still tons of cruft that simply doesn't belong.

I wish browsers universally established a hard resource budget for webpages. Cap it at 2MB runtime memory usage and let's see what happens.

This.

Unless limits are imposed, page size will increase without limit.

It's a Jevons Paradox / Parkinson's Law phenomenon.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#94

Post by robonerd »

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.

I browse that way today. Images, CSS and javascript disabled by default and whitelisted on a case-by-case basis with uMatrix. 90% of the time this makes websites better and I don't end up whitelisting anything. Most of the images paired with articles online are irrelevant stock photos that are only added to articles because the illiterate half of the population will close the page immediately if there isn't a picture to look at.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#95

Post by [deleted] »

sacrosanct wrote: post #26

Worth browsing the web with Lynx for a week just to see how convoluted the modern web has become. Roughly 10% of sites are viewable in Lynx and have a simple enough layout. Lynx due to it being text based also filters out all the AD-Tech, trackers, and JS bloat. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

[deleted]

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#96

Post by freeAgent »

dilyevsky wrote: post #19
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 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

Same here. I remember when I used to think twice before clicking a link and loading a page. It would take seconds to load most pages, so loading things unnecessarily was a huge waste of time. Now people don’t think twice about opening a bunch of links from search results all at the same time, etc.

I also remember loading being so slow that I could sit there watching an imagine file load a few rows of pixels at a time. And when downloading, I had to worry about tying up the phone line for x amount of time, even for things that were just a few MB. So yeah, it was definitely much slower “back in the day.”

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#97

Post by anovikov »

How will the web make money if all this "bullshit" stuff is removed? Unless you put all of it behind a paywall (which may be not a bad idea, in fact i'm waiting for a startup that will provide a "paywall to everything" service which you can plug your site in and get a cut)

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#98

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

dilyevsky wrote: post #19
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 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

Bandwidth has improved, i.e., internet speeds have improved. But the internet is not the web.

The amount of data websites try to make users transfer, e.g., through browsers that auto-load resources and run Javascript, has also increased. The number of websites using "simple HTML" has decreased, even though it makes the web faster. As such, for the web user, the speed of the web (cf. internet speed) has not improved. At best it has only stayed the same.

Thanks to increased internet speeds more data can be transferred in less time. But if the amount of data is increased instead of being held constant, e.g., simple HTML is no longer "good enough", then over time the user may not notice any speed improvement when using the web. The amount of data being transferred over the web today attributable to marketing, advertising, tracking and telemetry, and the number of DNS lookups to support those connections, has increased substantially.

When "tech" companies purport to work to "make the web faster" their strategy is never to reduce the practices that make the web slower, like advertising. In some cases they are working to allow more such traffic, without affecting speed too much so as to alert the user. Or to allow routing website traffic through their own servers, e.g., AMP.

Transferring the data required for 1990s websites over today's internet would make the 1990s web noticeably faster. Unfortunately, today's websites and "ad tech" are substantially more resource hungry, mainly for the benefit of generating revenue for "tech" company intermediaries. The user foots the bill for the increased resource usage.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#99

Post by marttt »

Same here, kind of. I'm reading this thread in Linux framebuffer mode and w3m, a text-mode browser. You can see images with this setup, but only by hovering a particular image link and launching an external viewer.

This has been my main computing setup for about half a year now, and it works surprisingly well (I'm neither a coder nor a web dev, though). Majority of the sites I visit are definitely bearable in text-only mode. It's a flexible setup, too, since I can seee the images if I need to.

For more inspiration, see Ali G Rudi's framebuffer tools [1] and a great site on w3m [2].

1: https://litcave.rudi.ir

2: http://w3m.rocks

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#100

Post by bombcar »

dilyevsky wrote: post #19
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 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

The single biggest improvement for me was tabbed browsing, even on a slow modem that let you open one page while reading another.

You don't read very fast anyway.

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