the site would have been nicer with a few images. Also the text layout was tedious - different fonts should've been used to convey metadata about the information in it.
The Bullshit Web
261–270 of 568 posts
Re: The Bullshit Web
#262>>"... pretty much any CNN article page includes an autoplaying video, a tactic which has allowed them to brag about having the highest number of video starts in their category. ... People really hate autoplaying video."
The result is that, even though I used to watch CNN often, it has been years since I've intentionally opened one of their web pages, and when I accidentally do so, I almost frantically close it to shut off the damn, auto-play -- and that's even if I was interested in the video content.
I'll get it somewhere else, thx.
Re: The Bullshit Web
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do all of those analytics server side, there's no reason to deliver it via JS and have the client do the computation. You're already sending all the required info to track that sort of thing via the request itself.
It's amazing to me that no one out there seems to do server-local handling of ads, either... If you put ads directly into your page instead of relying on burdensome external systems, suddenly blocking isn't a thing anymore. ALL of the functionality supposedly needed for analytics and an ad-driven business model can happen server side, without the page becoming sentient and loading a billion scripts and scattered reso…
There used to be an open source self-hosted (php) ad application called openx. It worked well for quite a while. In its later years, it suffered a number of high-profile security vulnerabilities, and the open source version was poorly maintained since OpenX [the company] was focused more on their hosted solution which probably had migrated to a different codebase or at least was a major version past the open source codebase.
The open source version has been renamed "Revive Adserver", and it looks maintained, but I don't think it's used nearly as much as the openx [open source version] of old.
If you use Revive Adserver or you design a server-local ad system in-house, it won't be as sophisticated as gigantic ad-providers who can do all sorts of segmentation and analysis (producing pretty reports which execs and stakeholders love even if that knowledge adds no value to the business).
Re: The Bullshit Web
#264I'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…
Comparing the raw text of a fiction novel to the code of a website is a pretty asinine comparison, honestly.
Completely agreed. I could continue by comparing it to the amount of bandwidth in a 30-minute CNN broadcast, all to read a few thousand words at me.
Re: The Bullshit Web
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
#3 is an interesting thought. So when something is abundant, inefficiency and wastefulness are fine? When it comes to bits, abundant to who? Those who can afford said abundance? Certainly not to those with bandwidth caps and slow internet access. Reminds me of a cartoon I saw once: "What if climate change turns out to be a hoax and we end up making the world better for nothing!" Since when is doing something efficien…
Since when is doing something efficiently and non-wastefully not a good idea for its own sake? I agree we should make things efficient for their own sake. But that's not what people are arguing about. They are arguing that the modern web is bad, and their reasons are weak. The modern web is terrific and we should not carelessly denigrate it, which is what I'm against. Do not denigrate the modern web in the name of ef…
If those coal power plants are replaced with alternative forms of energy, I don't see the problem... Talking about just "shutting them down" with nothing to replace them has absolutely nothing to do with that sentiment or the original cartoon... it's not remotely a reasonable reading of what I was saying.
Not to mention, my reply is to parent comment, not to the article in general. In no way did I say I completely agree with the author of the article- that's not what my comment was about.
However, if a news article with a load of JS and ads is considered to be this "modern web" then good riddance to it. I hope it goes away.
Yes, cool things can be done with the web, and some of those cool things take a lot of bandwidth or payload to accomplish- the examples (news sites, etc) are not these things.
What are your reasons for thinking the modern web is terrific? I agreed with that statement when I saw it, but as I think about it, I'm not so sure I do
Re: The Bullshit Web
#266I'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…
This dovetails into an idea I had [0]. Basically just client side scrape the web as it's used and deliver people this plain text and simple forms. It would have a maintained set of definitions and potentially even logic to put a better "front" on all this bullshit. It's like reverse ad block where you only whitelist some content instead of blacklisting it. You could argue sites will get good at fighting it, but if used enough by the common user, they'd just alienate them (e.g. my scrape/front for Google search makes it clear which results the app has a friendly scrape/front for).
Re: The Bullshit Web
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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). This just seems like such an abuse of what the web was meant to be. I can imagine the horror people in the 90s would have experienced if they new what JS was going to be used for when perusing news sites. Sometimes I wonde…
> I can imagine the horror people in the 90s would have experienced if they new what JS was going to be used for We understood the horror no less than we do now. Javascript in the 90s gave us infinite pop-ups, pop-unders, evasive controls, drive-by downloads and otherwise hijacked your browser and/or computer. There's a reason Proxomitron and other content blockers hit the scene by the early 2000s-- the need to shut…
Yeah, people under 33 seem to have a romanticized view of the internet. They believed there was no ads and it was flush with the kinds of content we enjoy today. Nope. Content existed but it was scarce/thin. Many of the internet users just stayed on AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve and never left to explore the WWW side of things. Those service providers were essentially national level BBSs.
There was no youtube, wikipedia, itunes or reddit. No instagram, twitter or google earth. The internet was basically geocities where most webpages were fan pages or pages/forums about niche interests.
I think people want to believe that because they believe that if ads were to disappear off the internet tomorrow, nothing would change. They don't realize that ads subsidize the content they consume, whether it's a youtube video they're watching or a reddit thread, ads are paying for that content. Nothing is free.
Re: The Bullshit Web
#268We 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.
uMatrix works on all browsers that matter.
Re: The Bullshit Web
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Well how is the format of plaintext the best method of getting information to the end user? What if you added a thin indexing layer on top of the plaintext? That would allow people to jump through huge documents with ease, but it's no longer plaintext. Sounds more valuable to me. Where is the line? What's the ideal? 2. Fair enough 3. Referencing "increasing the entropy in the universe" isn't a good argument becaus…
> but low efficiency has no business- or environmental- downside, then why be efficient with it? But it has. Data transfer and processing isn't free. It works on electricity. You may think that a difference between 10KB (efficient) and 10MB (current web) is meaningless because resources are abundant, and it let you save couple hours of dev time[0] - but consider that this difference is per user , and you saved a coup…
I don't think people actually waste three orders of magnitude more electricity by loading 10MB vs 10KB - sure, that much more CPU time is used specifically on loading the extra data, but that would be a fraction of what's being used for all the other processing going on, and people don't just flip the power switch as soon as a page load finishes.
Re: The Bullshit Web
#270I'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…
Moby Dick doesn’t have any pictures or video.
Audiovisual media has value.