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Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

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Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#21

Post by harryf »

thenomad wrote: post #13

This article really highlights something that I'm constantly amazed by - just how SLOW major media organisations are prepared to allow their websites to be. When I'm designing a landing page for anything significant (product, movie, whatever), I'm looking for sub-second load times - ideally below 500ms. Why? Because there are tons of studies showing that page load speed makes a huge difference to user experience, ret…

Because their job is not software development, it's reporting the news and earning from advertising.

Sure they have developers working _for_ them but that doesn't make them a software development company. When you factor in all the factors related to running a high traffic site these days; different browser versions, web vs. mobile, scaling etc. etc. it's unrealistic to expect them to be able to stay on top of it.

Along comes Facebook and Apple News and that's the magic wand: those guys "get" software development so delegate the problem to them

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#22

Post by scholia »

Animats wrote: post #6

From the article: "The web definitely has a speed problem due to over-design and the junkyard of tools people feel they have to include on every single web page. However, I don’t agree that the web has an inherent slowness. The articles for the new Facebook feature will be sent over exactly the same connection as web pages. However, the web versions of the articles have an extra layer of cruft attached to them, and t…

I saved a Washington Post page -- a short interview -- and it came to 3054KB. I saved a NY Post page and it came to 2843K. For all I know, there could have been piles of background junk that weren't saved with the page.

It does seem a bit remarkable that these sites need to ship 3 megabytes of stuff to deliver 20K of text....

I think I need your web service ;-)

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#23

Post by Someone1234 »

thenomad wrote: post #13

This article really highlights something that I'm constantly amazed by - just how SLOW major media organisations are prepared to allow their websites to be. When I'm designing a landing page for anything significant (product, movie, whatever), I'm looking for sub-second load times - ideally below 500ms. Why? Because there are tons of studies showing that page load speed makes a huge difference to user experience, ret…

Gaining high speed for a small website is easier than keeping that speed as your site grows. There are numerous reasons for this e.g.:

- Giving non-technical people a CMS (where they'll upload unoptimised images).

- Feature creep.

- More complicated infrastructure (geo-distributed, load balanced infrastructure, etc). Tuning is definitely still possible but harder.

- Politics (e.g. trying to remove some pointless JS or CSS could take months and require several meetings).

- The absolute cost of doing anything grows.

Google and others have shown that large web-sites can keep things fast, but they've also shown it takes the entire organisation prioritising that for it to happen. I'm sure big media sites would benefit from being faster, in a measurable way, but the key is: Can you get other (non-technical) departments to agree to make real-world cuts to make that happen? Maybe.

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#24

Post by wahsd »

And facebook users are it's foot-soldiers. As long as people converge on Facebook and while Zuckerberg moves ever closer to his goal of replacing the internet with Facebook, the assault will not cease until the society has been subjugated and the internet domesticated.

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#25

Post by matthewmacleod »

thenomad wrote: post #13

This article really highlights something that I'm constantly amazed by - just how SLOW major media organisations are prepared to allow their websites to be. When I'm designing a landing page for anything significant (product, movie, whatever), I'm looking for sub-second load times - ideally below 500ms. Why? Because there are tons of studies showing that page load speed makes a huge difference to user experience, ret…

You are not kidding. The user experience of most media sites is appalling, mostly down to performance.

Here's a great example I saw recently when I hit the Daily Mash without Ghostery enabled: https://www.dropbox.com/s/seu0run7pn4tbc6/Screenshot%202015-... - in excess of fifty(!!) third-party scripts and trackers, rendering the browser unusable for multiple seconds. It's a frustrating, miserable experience.

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#26

Post by throwawayoldmed »

thenomad wrote: post #13

This article really highlights something that I'm constantly amazed by - just how SLOW major media organisations are prepared to allow their websites to be. When I'm designing a landing page for anything significant (product, movie, whatever), I'm looking for sub-second load times - ideally below 500ms. Why? Because there are tons of studies showing that page load speed makes a huge difference to user experience, ret…

It's a result of two things: The company is big, and the company is legacy.

The fact that the company is big means that there are siloed areas where, for example, the analytics team doesn't talk to the content team. Or the local station management doesn't talk to the CMS developers. These disconnects are present all over such organizations. This means that any changes are likely to be both overdesigned (because everyone has to have their input) and very slow to implement (because everyone has to approve).

The fact that the company is legacy means that they simply view the web as another outlet for their content. They don't believe in optimizing for the web because they have many surfaces for their content, and it's historically more important for, say, the paper newspaper to be laid out correctly than the web version of the same article. These sorts of people don't change their views easily, and they still don't see the web as the primary outlet for the content (they see that as the paper newspaper, or the terrestrial radio broadcast, or the terrestrial TV broadcast). The web is always secondary at best. Overcoming these attitudes is quite difficult.

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#27

Post by [deleted] »

Animats wrote: post #6

From the article: "The web definitely has a speed problem due to over-design and the junkyard of tools people feel they have to include on every single web page. However, I don’t agree that the web has an inherent slowness. The articles for the new Facebook feature will be sent over exactly the same connection as web pages. However, the web versions of the articles have an extra layer of cruft attached to them, and t…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#28

Post by rockdoe »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #25
thenomad wrote: post #13

This article really highlights something that I'm constantly amazed by - just how SLOW major media organisations are prepared to allow their websites to be. When I'm designing a landing page for anything significant (product, movie, whatever), I'm looking for sub-second load times - ideally below 500ms. Why? Because there are tons of studies showing that page load speed makes a huge difference to user experience, ret…

You are not kidding. The user experience of most media sites is appalling, mostly down to performance. Here's a great example I saw recently when I hit the Daily Mash without Ghostery enabled: https://www.dropbox.com/s/seu0run7pn4tbc6/Screenshot%202015-... - in excess of fifty(!!) third-party scripts and trackers, rendering the browser unusable for multiple seconds. It's a frustrating, miserable experience.

Mozilla reported an average pageload performance of 40% by just blocking the tracking scripts.

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#29

Post by GBKS »

Here's a quick illustration I put together recently to show the cruft of mobile news sites: https://dribbble.com/shots/2118552-DBC-News-Concept/attachme...

I hope this whole discussion is a bit of a wake-up call for news sites to get their priorities and tech straightened out.

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#30

Post by jrochkind1 »

woah wrote: post #17
jrochkind1 wrote: post #15

> Your problem is that if you put your developers ahead of your customers, you’ll end up with just the developers. This implies it's just a matter of priorities. In fact, it's a matter of cost. The OP admits that what he advocates "isn't easy", technically. That means it's more expensive. More developer hours, more highly-skilled developers, or both. It is a matter of priorities in the sense that an organization need…

I hate to be the guy- but how about just serving some html and some css?

I dunno, what do you think are the reasons media sites aren't doing that?

Ads? Tracking? What they think is a good design/UX that users will like, find easy and enjoyable to read, and associate with professionalism and credibility? (are they right or wrong?) Good UX for multi-media presentations? Social media sharing icons? Good UX for mobile? Comments features? Other stuff?

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