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The Bullshit Web

pxlnv.com

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191–200 of 568 posts

Re: The Bullshit Web

#191

Post by Gravityloss »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #5

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That's lower than the "average" news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that's more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb. I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long…

I don't know how many people here read usenet or were on old mailing lists. You could have removed a some hard edges in usability and everything would have been connected to phones with monochrome text displays back in the nineties already. They didn't even provide decent email experience.

But instead we got the technology developing through some ringtone stuff advertised on TV.

I guess it's something that you can instantly show to your friends.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#192

Post by wuliwong »

Lately I've been noticing this with Facebook. It is interesting that in its early stages, my perception of Facebook was that it was a very well built site. It seemed simple, clean, loaded fast, etc. It seemed particularly lean when compared to Myspace. Without really delving into the details of exactly what is happening today, I definitely perceive the web app as being slower. Obviously it is delivering a ton more images and video but nonetheless the experience seems slow. The ios app on the other hand still feels very performant to me. I think their handling of video is really impressive.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#193

Post by confounded »

throwawaymath wrote: post #31
soared wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think thats a meaningful comparison. Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. NYT employs 1,300 people. When you read a book all you get is the text. NYT has text, images, related articles, analytics, etc. Moby Dick doesn't have to know what pages you read. NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that…

> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough). No they don't. They really don't need to know any of that. They don't even get a pass on tracking because they're providing a free whatever - I pay for a subscription to the NYT. The business, or a meaningfully substantial…

Reading without cookies or JavaScript enables seems to fix every problem the NYT has.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#194

Post by Zimahl »

ukulele wrote: post #45

Unpopular opinion alert: Maybe the "bullshit" is only bullshit to you, the thorny tech-savvy reader. Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and their business was improved by adding fonts, stylesheets, API calls, spinners, scripts, high-res images, and god knows what else. Maybe speed improvements are not important beyond a certain point. Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. Maybe micro-optimization…

> Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and their business was improved by adding fonts, stylesheets, API calls, spinners, scripts, high-res images, and god knows what else.

All i can say is that I work at a small-ish multi-million dollar business that got bought by a very large multi-billion dollar business. Our site has become very, very bloated due to everything that our parent corp wants in the name of 'making things better'. I'm not saying we are stagnant, but those changes really haven't increased our bottom line in any significant way. We now spend more time and dev resources supporting a site with much more 'bullshit'. Real business decisions, ones that benefited the customer, are where real increases in value were seen.

This of course is anecdotal, but I've never really heard the opposite.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#195

Post by wuliwong »

Alex3917 wrote: post #55

Yes, we should definitely go back to the days where there was only one stylesheet per page and the web wasn't accessible to those with visual impairments. Being blind is clearly just a lifestyle choice, and we shouldn't be catering to the blind agenda. /s In all seriousness, most of the problem with bloat is on the mobile side. But in another ~1.25 years iPhones will have enough advanced LTE functionality that they w…

What do you mean by "bloat is on the mobile side"?.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#196

Post by pmlnr »

nickheer wrote: post #22
waivek wrote: post #20

This static website seems to be down. Archive link: http://web.archive.org/web/20180731143228/https://pxlnv.com/...

Thank you. This is so embarrassing.

There's nothing embarrassing about it; I'm yet to see a WordPress based site which was able to withstand the Hug of ackerNews, though SuperCache should have helped.

For a WordPress site, yours is slim and very fast.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#197

Post by dkoston »

I disagree that the AMP cache is the main benefit of AMP. There are plenty of CDNs that give performance similar to, or better than the AMP cache.

The only benefit of AMP is that the pages are promoted higher in results.

Back to the main topic of the article, the same could be said for the desktop and the mobile phone. Developers and framework builders are constantly adding bloat as cpu/memory increase. Since most people aren't writing their own frameworks and many are importing large parts of their apps from npm/gems/etc, everyone gets hit with the bloat. It's a vicious cycle for sure.

It's a shame that so many open source authors add bloat into their packages in exchange for popularity. They want all the users so you get tons of code that's never used in 90% of projects.

The big example of the above is express. It's a terrible cycle as the vast majority of people learning JavaScript have hopped on the express bandwagon and are now creating APIs with mediocre performance by importing a massive webserver they often do not need.

Overall though, it seems to show that most people prefer convenience over accuracy and performance (passive aggressive stab at mongo?)

Re: The Bullshit Web

#198

Post by vitaflo »

cocoa19 wrote: post #98

Another point for the bullshit web: The GDPR cookie consent notification. I really hate clicking on those notifications to make them go away. Designers, can you please just add a non-obtrusive link, instead of a pop up that covers half my browser screen?

Sure, but first let me have you talk to my PM who got this request for an obtrusive popup from our lawyers.

Designers don't want stupid popups all over the screen. Designers don't want half the bullshit that's put into sites these days. Our hands are tied. It's rarely our decision.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#199

Post by skepticmoron »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #5

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That's lower than the "average" news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that's more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb. I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long…

Your math does not add up. It is 1 * (6.6 + 3 * 5.9) + 3 * (5 + 3 * 5.9) == 92.4. Unless you are speaking about approximations obviously.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#200

Post by TeMPOraL »

wuliwong wrote: post #181
blub wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many logical reasons why various websites are so bloated. Certainly the market realities and web development culture play a role. That doesn't change the fact that the end result is bullshit, though. The tragedy of the commons is still a tragedy. I don't have a solution for commercial news organisations. If they can't completely subsidise their web presence through other means, it's pretty much guaranteed t…

I don't understand how you are relating this to the tragedy of the commons other than saying that because something has a reason it doesn't preclude it from being something.

Everyone selfishly optimizing their bottomline ("let's earn a bit more by including extra JS analytics bullshit", "let's save some time on our end by making a million people waste a little bit of electricity every pageview") - each initially reaping some short-term benefits, but together ultimately turning the web into the shitshow it is today.

That's textbook tragedy of the commons.

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