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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#231

Post by liquidwax »

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 first realised how heavy these pages are when I disabled javascript. Things load in the blink of an eye. \Most\ pages work and the web remains largely usable.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#232

Post by amiga-workbench »

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…

I cant imagine how poor the web is for blind users nowadays with all the hyperactive javascript fucking with the DOM constantly, I really feel sorry for the poor gits who have to write screen readers.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#233

Post by stan_rogers »

StyloBill wrote: post #122
amelius wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video is not actually the problem (for me). It's the audio. Why can't my browser (Chrome) still not give me appropriate control over audio?

It should be better in the near future: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/3/17251104/google-chrome-66-...

That's already in place. There's nothing in the way of actual user control other than muting the tab. The browser decides, pretty much, and you can't argue with it if it's decided to list a site as something that can autoplay audio based on your interaction level (which doesn't necessarily mean you've ever deliberately enabled audio on the site).

Re: The Bullshit Web

#234

Post by overcast »

gooseus wrote: post #138
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 can't agree more with the points you make, I've spent a decent amount of time and effort reducing the overhead of my blog, for example - https://goose.us/thoughts/on-the-purpose-of-life/ That page includes images and "embedded" youtube videos, but loads 454kb of 3,187 words with 10 requests in 450-600ms - if anyone has any suggestions on how to reduce that further, I'd love to hear. Going to bookmark that txti.es s…

I'd start with the 100+KB PNG images. None of those pictures are complex, they can be compressed much more.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#235

Post by exolymph »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #142
ChuckMcM wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this rant, you should go the next step: All you need to 'fix' this is a fast loading news website that gets enough paid subscribers to earn enough margin from subscriptions that you can pay for a news staff, an office, and various overheads. That is a longish way of saying that 99.9% of the overhead in any modern web site can be traced almost entirely to the mechanisms by which that web site is attempting to e…

Hence the rant mentioning Molochian economy, under which we operate. And that reference explains in depth why this is a very hard problem. I like the rant too. Except maybe the bit about sending content at the speed of humans - I for one would like to take lightweight, bullshit-free content as fast as it can be sent, to pipe it to further processing on my end, in the never-ending quest to automate things in my life.

Background for anyone who hasn't read it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Re: The Bullshit Web

#236

Post by TeMPOraL »

agumonkey wrote: post #65
soared wrote: post #24

Have you ever seen this discussed outside of HN or dev-centric subreddits? Your average user doesn't care about this 'issue' at all, and thats why it won't ever change. Proof the author doesn't relate to any typical user: > I’m not asking much of it; I have opened a text-based document on the web Nobody besides devs would open a website and think "Oh this a text-based document opened in a web browser". Its a website,…

Indirectly yes, they will ask why their computer is slow. Then they'll buy a new one and accept the salespitch for fiber gbps link. ps: you all must understand that the average user believe in tech, if the web is slow, it can't be google's fault; if the salesman spread that 'of course you need a machine that is web capable' all they'll care is that it's not too expensive and they'll buy the damn machine, and maybe th…

Wish this would be pinned on top of all such discussions.

This is precisely what's happening. In the mind of regular user, the web looks like it's supposed to, because they don't have enough technical knowledge to correctly understand what's happening. Users accept what they get, because they don't understand it. And as you said here, the complaints get targeted at the wrong thing. "Why is my computer so slow? Did I get a virus?". No, it's just that Google just deployed even more bloated iteration of their GMail UI, CNN just added 20 more tracking scripts, and YouTube is now eating half of your RAM for no good reason.

I get through this dance with many of my non-technical family members and acquaintances. I can extend the life of their machines only so much with ad-blockers and cleaning out adware. Ultimately, they'll buy a new, faster machine, just to return to the status quo. And maybe I'll inherit one of their "slow" laptops and pull out 2+ more years of professional, productive use from it.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#237

Post by liquidwax »

stickfigure wrote: post #218

Try these sites without javascript . It's AMAZING. The chrome extension I'm using ("Quick Javascript Switcher") disables JS on a domain-by-domain basis, so it doesn't break the whole web. Every news site I've tried is massively more usable with Javascript disabled - loads in a snap, scrolls without jerky motion, zero popups or autoplay videos. Usually you get all the text and most of the images. Some news websites ha…

I can vouch for this. Although I've been doing this with regular chrome (disabled javascript by default) and I whitelist sites with the click of on icon in the location bar.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#238

Post by dgudkov »

isoprophlex wrote: post #72
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…

It's bullshit allright. Thousands of cpu hours, megabytes and dollars wasted on some user spying turdheap the marketing guys NEEDED to put in an app, 'to track user behaviour'. What a euphemism. Without spilling too many beans, we're using a solution that records an actual movie of the user using our app, each time a session is started. In six months, the only thing we learned: half of the users that finish setting u…

>Thousands of cpu hours, megabytes and dollars wasted on some user spying turdheap the marketing guys NEEDED to put in an app, 'to track user behaviour'.

I understand that somewhere in a perfect universe, tech guys just make things right and money just flow in without those pesky marketing people ever involved. Unfortunately, in our universe if you don't do marketing and don't analyze user behavior your business is toast.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#239

Post by jazoom »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #230
makecheck wrote: post #126

We have a ridiculously-backwards model on the web where you essentially pay for what you use (via your data plan, and via forced ads prior to promised content) without having any way to know in advance what it will end up costing you to display content. Heck, you don’t even know if the content will display correctly after all that loading. Worse, there are many ways to trigger loads accidentally, meaning you may want…

Browsers should start offering the option to deny all cross origin resources too.

It would be easy to make an extension to do that but I suspect most websites would no longer work correctly. Many websites have their own API server on a different domain, many host images on another domain, most use a CDN of some kind which hosts CSS, JS and sometimes HTML on another domain, etc.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#240

Post by monadgonad »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #200
wuliwong wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People’s/companies’ own websites aren’t commons. The protocols that make up the web itself haven’t degraded through use; this is no more a tragedy of the commons than if every shop in your town made you wait a few seconds before you could go inside.
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