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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#271

Post by chickenfries »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #219
chickenfries wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough but these rants on HN about publishers never seem to contain any examples of publications that are both successful and delivering pages that weigh scarcely more than their plain text equivalent. I think you invite the “false dichotomy” by making the comparison between plain text Moby Dick and the front page of one of the most successful newspapers in the world in 2018. I agree with many of your points but…

Did you read the article I posted? I definitely put forward both an acknowledgment that media firms won't change and ideas towards reducing usage where possible.

Again with your post I see many more words about Moby Dick and nostalgizing for a past that no longer exists then words about a possible solution, and while your solutions are better than the typical “just move to a susbscription model,” I can’t see how we would generate the political will for anything other than cheap internet. We can’t even agree to tax carbon emissions yet. How are we going to tax bandwith and convince everyone to accept a low bandwith internet?

I don’t have any great ideas myself, but part of me sees the Americans with Disabilities Act as a model for getting this done.

I really don’t like AMP because of the Google Cache and the potential for google to bias their search results page to emphasize AMP pages over similarly performing non AMP pages, but it’s a better thought out attempt to fix “the Bullshit Web” than anything else I’ve seen, and it has been extremely successful in decreasing payload size for many readers of sites like NYT and other major publishers.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#272

Post by arkh »

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 5MB doesn't matter to most people.

You sure won't see those in your analytics dashboard.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#273

Post by soared »

paulsutter wrote: post #33
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…

You’re right about the problem: web pages tend to scale with the size of the organization serving them, not the size of the content. But this is the failure, not a defense. It’s a big problem on mobile and the reason I read HN comments before the article. > NYT employs 1,300 people

Definitely a good point. You'd imagine they'd have at least 1 person who optimizes the site for page size / load speed.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#274

Post by arkh »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #257
jazoom wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use one of the many ad/tracking blockers. Websites will still work. Blocks sketchy-analytics.com. Why make this more complex than it needs to be?

Because when I go to use a website its an interaction between me and them, I never want any third party involvement. Allow requests to subdomains but nothing outside that.

Use noscript then.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#275

Post by pathseeker »

soared wrote: post #248
foepys wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the first, it's sufficient enough to just look at the number of page requests. For the second, I never got explained to me how UX analysis really works for news sites. Isn't it enough to put 2 or 3 people in a room and show them a few variations of the UI? There isn't really much to publishing text, images, and a few graphs. Graphs are a very well explored field, I don't think you can learn more about them by jus…

Server logs just aren't sufficient, no matter how many times hn says so. You don't get enough data to make data-driven decisions. Thats like giving a data scientist 1/3rd of the available data, and saying "thats good enough". You'd expect ux to be a small unit, but that includes everyone who works on revenue-generating ads. Moving one tiny thing has a direct impact on revenue, which affects every person employed by n…

>Thats like giving a data scientist 1/3rd of the available data, and saying "thats good enough".

And it could easily be enough. Having 1/3 of a quantity of something doesn't mean you barely had enough before.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#276

Post by cheezymoogle »

kodablah wrote: post #266
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…

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 us…

I've often toyed with the idea of using multi-user systems over SSH running Gopher and Lynx to achieve something like this.

In the process, it would also decentralize communities and establish digital equivalents of coffee shops (i.e. places to work in public and meet strangers)--basically SDF, but deployable on Raspberry Pis with more modern userland toys (i.e. software actually designed to be multi-user on the same system).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System

Re: The Bullshit Web

#277

Post by themacguffinman »

throwawaymath wrote: post #226
closeparen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYT needs to produce and recommend content that people find engaging to continue earning their subscription dollars. The idea that tracking is purely or primarily there to support a business model of selling user data is a strawman invented by self-righteous HNers. You need to know what parts of your product are effective to make it competitive in today’s marketplace.

I'm not accusing anyone of selling my data and I'm not trying to champion a crusade against the entire advertising industry. I'm asserting that the NYT can achieve the substantial majority of the advertising optimization and targeting it needs to do to be profitable 1) without doing user-specific tracking and 2) without making page loads extremely slow. Like I said, serve me an ad. I'm not an idealist, I understand w…

> I'm asserting that the NYT can achieve the substantial majority of the advertising optimization and targeting it needs to do to be profitable

Majority, not all. Why should they leave money on the table, exactly?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#278

Post by XCSme »

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…

How do you know if the client has an error and the content was not loaded/displayed as expected? How do you know if placing the content on the right side or the left side increases conversion rate by 10% if you don't do A/B testing? There are huge business advantages when you use analytics. You don't care about creepily "tracking" a specific person, you just care about getting better conversion rates and happier users.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#279

Post by agumonkey »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #236
agumonkey wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's hard to educate people too. You have to go hard and deep to convince them enough not to spend money on their next mall trip.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#280

Post by goatlover »

mahranch wrote: post #267
jstarfish wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, it…

The web was intended to be a free exchange of knowledge, not ad driven, regardless of how JS was abused in the late 90s, early 2000s. A scripting language was added to the web because of Netscape’s commercial interests in Creating an alternative to MS products.
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