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The Bullshit Web (2018)

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Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#101

Post by metadat »

tonymet wrote: post #25

Google made a solid attempt at improving web performance and usability with AMP and offering preferred ranking - and hacker news mostly skewered them for it. Publishers need to be compelled to improve performance but the current model encourages bloat

Amp is the worst, and now Google has reneged and rolled back on it, yet many sites still have it integrated because it's more work to undo all the work that's already been done to migrate to amp to begin with. A solid, first-class, grade-HIV+ clusterfuck.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#102

Post by eternityforest »

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…

I remember the web being scary more than anything in the 56k days. Viruses were something you constantly thought about on any site you didn't know well.

Now we just have data collection, which is I suppose theoretically pretty scary, but not an immediate concern at the moment for most people, or at least not a big enough to change people's behavior.

I also remember it being a bit slow. Sometimes a lot slow. And media being obviously near unusable.

I'd definitely take almost everything about the modern web over the old web. Except the content, which was way better back then, and endless scrolling, which is ass. I strongly suspect the two may be related.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#103

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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…

It doesn’t matter much if people are willing to pay or not: without a viable method of micro transactions, $5/mo is the next viable tier above free.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#104

Post by [deleted] »

at_a_remove wrote: post #68
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…

[deleted]

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#105

Post by vmoore »

Aside from bullshit, a few other adjectives could be used to describe the modern web:

- Obtrusive

- Bloated

- Unnecessary

- Distracting

- Orwellian

- Pushy

- Intrusive

- Resource intensive

- Bandwidth intensive

- Tacky

- Hyped up

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#106

Post by ksec »

It is sad I thought this was submitted on HN not that long ago, but it turns out COVID somehow makes 4 years of life span felt like a year.

The summary of my comment from previous discussions remains the same.

>My biggest problem is with the idea of extending the Web via Javascript and everything should be Javascript only. Rather than extending the Web Browser native function.

But no one wants to tackle this problem. Google isn't interested, Mozilla were the first to want everything on the web to be Javascript. Apple wants everything to be an App. Even the Government wants everything to be an App so they could police Apple and Google only.

The web is dying not because it cant be made better or competitions are driving them out. It is dying because no one in power gives a fuck about it.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#107

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

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…

something to be said about constraint and enforcing some artificial limitations on yourself as a developer or designer.

i think the issue is down to developers, on their iMac Pro with 4k screen, 5 mins from the data centre. a lack of appreciation for the bloat, because it's not really felt.

i recently took a habit to stop updating software. i noticed how many updates are totally useless and often causing regressions in my experience.

Re: The Bullshit Web (2018)

#109

Post by abxytg »

mysterydip wrote: post #35
abxytg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? 100,000x even. Obviously yes! Even the web -- the things the higher resource caps enable are unbelievable. Yes bottom feeding news sites are worse for it, boo hoo. Have you see the shit you can do in a web browser today? On any device? It's so, so, so much c…

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

Here's one -- cloud saves! Remember carrying floppies?

How about real time collaborative editing?

All the above cross platform?

C'mon now be realistic :).

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