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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#351

Post by smolder »

themacguffinman wrote: post #344
smolder wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think it's very surprising. Advertisers won't let publishers serve ads directly because that requires trust in publishers to not misrepresent stats like impressions and real views. I don't know how you'd solve that trust problem when publishers are actually incentivized to cheat advertisers.

I think you may have identified the biggest issue, and it's a shame the pragmatic solution is an unpleasant technical solution.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#352

Post by awinder »

Web developers often don’t have a choice whether to ship bullshit or not. Hell, engineering managers and directors often probably don’t have this choice.

The single greatest feature of AMP (which I dislike with great passion, don’t get me wrong) is that it forces broken org structures to make better engineering choices. There is no negotiation. There is no “marketing director is higher on the pecking order”. There is just design constraints placed from outside of the organization that must be followed.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#353

Post by userbinator »

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…

but don't want it to be hugged to death:

Incidentally, this is also another reason for keeping pages small --- bandwidth costs. I remember when free hosts with quite miniscule monthly bandwidth and disk space allotments were the norm, and kept my pages on those as small as possible.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#354

Post by userbinator »

krrrh wrote: post #168
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 support your effort to make Moby-Dicks the football-field-like unit of measurement for text-focused data. It’s close enough to the 1.44 MB floppy disk to handle easy mental conversion of historical rants, and half of the people reading this have probably never held one of those. I still remember downloading a text version of a 0.9 Moby-Dick book from some FTP site and carrying it around on a floppy so I could read…

For a rather more technical comparison, 4,600 pages is more than the size of Intel's x86/64 Software Developer's Manual, which is ~3-4k pages.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#355

Post by Avamander »

dkoston wrote: post #349
superkuh wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The only benefit of AMP is that the pages are promoted higher in results. Not just promoted in the results but actually pre-loaded in the background when you're using google search. It's double the monopoly fun.

True. Hopefully anti-competitive stuff like this will be challenged in court so we don’t have to play the game.

Yandex does it too with their own tech, just mentioning. I think if it actually were standardized properly without a monopoly it could become a good thing.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#356

Post by michaelmrose »

MrEldritch wrote: post #314
MrEldritch wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You actually don't need all that crap to serve adverts, or really even to do tracking: people managed without it in the 90s. It's just that it's more work to get the same effect without a buttload of JS in this day and age" While I sympathize with this sentiment, this is also the entire history of computing in a nutshell. Moore's Law has driven us orders of magnitude beyond where we were when personal computers fi…

(All that being said, I'm also fairly salty about having 8 GB of RAM and a mechanical hard drive rendering my computer incredibly painful to use as technology has marched on. Discord - which I use almost exclusively as an IRC chatroom with persistent while-you-were-gone chat history, embedded media, and fun custom emotes - is an entire Electron app that eats over 100 MB minimum; Firefox is eating 750 MB just keeping…

My i3wm environment doesn't randomly start anything I don't ask it to start and runs very comfortably with 8gb of ram heck it would run fine with 4gb and no swap. Maybe you are running the wrong os.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#357

Post by smolder »

harshreality wrote: post #263
smolder wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Funny that you mention that --in a former life I had to develop around and maintain an openx system.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#358

Post by userbinator »

Theodores wrote: post #324
cheezymoogle wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as #1 goes, I'm arguing that plaintext is the ideal to strive towards, not the living practical reality. As far as indexing and access, the Gopher protocol and Teletext are great options to look at. As previously noted, if you don't find that waste is fundamentally wrong on a moral level, there's no point forward from here. I view myself on a planet of dwindling resources, vanishing biodiversity, and warming a…

I have given this discussion a good looking over to see if anyone cares for the environment. Glad to find someone that does. I believe that care for the environment and design that puts being green first is going to have its time in web design. I also believe that along with document structure, accessibility and 'don't make me think' UX that eco-friendliness is going to become a core design principle in a lot of the…

I think the car analogy is flawed; yes, mid-century US cars were not very economical/efficient, but they sacrificed that for comfort --- big roomy interiors, cushy seats, soft suspensions, automatic transmissions, A/C, etc. The automakers were simply obliging to please customers with these features. There's a reason "econobox" is mostly a pejorative.

On the other hand, bloated slow websites only serve the needs of their authors, while annoying all their users. Users aren't asking for more tracking, ads, or any of that other bullshit.

(Full disclosure: I'm a big fan of vintage "Detroit Iron". You really have to ride in one to understand the experience.)

Re: The Bullshit Web

#359

Post by derekp7 »

Papirola wrote: post #332
komali2 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh they could email me articles plaintext and I'd happily hand over my money.

we used to have usenet...

And when I first got online in the early 90's, my ISP had an additional subscription option to get real newspaper-type articles delivered in a special usenet newsgroup hierarchy (can't remember the name of the news service itself though).

Re: The Bullshit Web

#360

Post by JoshMnem »

The Web was becoming unbearable until I started browsing with all CSS and JS off by default (using umatrix and 50,000 lines in my hosts file). It's an amazing improvement. If I can't read something, I enable some CSS and change the defaults for that site. Firefox reader mode helps. I also disable all CSS animation with Stylus.
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