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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#291

Post by LolNoGenerics »

soared wrote: post #21
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 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).

That's analytics. The marketing stuff that is causing the bloat isn't doing that much in comparison. Trackers are often coded very wasteful and are redundant by nature. You can have easily dozens to hundreds of them all doing the same stuff just with different APIs. It is insane and out of control and has absolutely nothing to do with gathering insights about your app and improving. It is pure external 3rd party marketing.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#292

Post by user5994461 »

pseudocook wrote: post #6
edhelas wrote: post #3

It's not only the web anymore. What about the desktop Slack that can take up to 1Gb of RAM for a "simple" chat client.

Desktop Slack runs on Electron, no? Which essentially lets web developers develop a "native-ish" cross-platform app, without learning a whole new platform. There is a long, long history of attempts to make good, cross-platform, native apps. In the late 1990s there was a company called Visix that had such a library that worked on Windows and Unix. There have been Windows implementations of Motif/XWindows. There was of…

Qt and Java can do cross platform software, however it's not possible to make a UI that's usable on desktop, tablet and mobile. You will end up creating separate apps.

Qt is actually really impressive in my opinion, it's possible to recompile a desktop software for mobile, sometimes without any code change at all.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#293

Post by peatmoss »

sgustard wrote: post #264
pc86 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Broadcasts are great! You can send a lot of content out, and it’s essentially zero marginal cost per additional receiver. Plus, it’s very hard to track behavior of consumers without their explicit consent.

People are most familiar with realtime broadcast audio and video, however I could see something like newsgroups working via a broadcast medium.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#294

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Bullshit Web

#295

Post by kodablah »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #276
kodablah wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My main reason for client side is to skirt legal troubles that can result from running a web-filtering proxy (not whether it's legal or not, but whether you will be in legal fights). Either way, needs to be as transparent as possible and as usable by the less-tech-savvy as possible.

But that's really all it is, a web server (or an app, or an extension, or a combo) that serves you up the web looking like Craigslist. Would require strongly curated set of "fronts"/"recipes".

Re: The Bullshit Web

#296

Post by dredmorbius »

wuliwong wrote: post #192

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 im…

I'd long griped about Google+ page size. Happened to poke around FB for a bit (couple of years back). Immensely worse.

Google's somewhat criticised redesign about 18 months ago actually hugely improved memory usage. Site's still on a declining tragectory....

Re: The Bullshit Web

#297

Post by itronitron »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #284
TeMPOraL wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean sending you news in a digital letter ?

How intriguing! I would like to subscribe to your... how do you say... letter of news.

but a letter of news may be too small, maybe we can remove that size constraint and call it 'a paper of news' that would be delivered

Re: The Bullshit Web

#298

Post by russdpale »

dgudkov wrote: post #238
isoprophlex wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Sure, if your content sucks. If you need all that bullshit to stay profitable then perhaps the business isn't really needed at all. "but that is the industry competition for you, everyone does it."

To that, all I can say is perhaps some regulation is required to level the playing field.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#300

Post by user5994461 »

scarygliders wrote: post #105

> People really hate autoplaying video Yes, this a billion-fold! Every single newspaper site I peruse uses autoplaying video. The experience goes like this: Load up the front page of newspaper site. Select an article of interest and click on its link. Article loads. A video player pops into existence on the lower right hand corner of the page, and the video starts playing. Most annoying. However it gets more egregiou…

If it can help you, think of the video as the content. It really is the only content that matters on that page.

Yes, the site only exists to deliver that video, not any news. That video earns revenues, news do not.

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