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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#361

Post by ubernostrum »

fwip wrote: post #345
jancsika wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So while you are fiercely criticizing sites which apparently understand and leverage the reality of zero-marginal cost digital data, you assume that data caps are a necessity in a digital world. Workers don't shovel extra connectivity into the towers when you go over your data cap. So why are you focusing on data flowing over the nearly-always-on connection you have through your data plan, rather than the bullshit te…

Data caps are like your city bus. You can buy a bulk number of rides per month at a discount, and everything over that is billed at a regular rate. The bus doesn't magically add more seats when you make extra trips on it, but it still costs more to take the bus three times a day than twice a week. Even though the marginal cost of your body on the bus is minimal, having the fee serves to reduce crowding (demand at tha…

Both of the public transit systems I use on a regular basis sell me monthly unlimited-use passes.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#362

Post by dkoston »

Avamander wrote: post #355
dkoston wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good to know.

Agree that if there was a body with representation from all major engines, this could be good.

I personally don’t want my content to be served in such a way that requires me to use a specific analytics product though. Would be ok with it if log access was part of the standard.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#363

Post by freyr »

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…

Bad comparison, Moby Dick never tracked your activity across the web and sold your data to advertisers.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#364

Post by matheusmoreira »

nrhk wrote: post #99
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not idiots, they just don't give a crap about waste until it affects their bottom line. (Most humans seem to operate on this principle) A lot of the business-related bullshit is a response to advertising and sales. But a lot is also lazy tech people slapping pieces together until it does a thing, and they don't care that it loads 100x more data than it needs to, because again, doesn't affect their bottom line…

Why would they care, they have to do the work of 5 in the time of one because there's now off the shelf solutions for everything. Too bad if those solutions often come bloated and incorrectly configured, maybe they should hire more engineers. Some business prioritize loading speeds but big ones with brand reputation won't care, they have little to lose.

> they have little to lose.

Then let's make them lose. The more widespread bullshit blockers become, the more money they will lose.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#365

Post by throwawaymath »

themacguffinman wrote: post #277
throwawaymath wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because it's disrespectful of user privacy, performance inefficient and computationally wasteful?

Most companies are not achieving the platonic maximalization of profit or shareholder value. They leave money on the table for a variety of reasons. It's not beyond the pale that this would be one of them. If you don't agree, then frankly it's probably an axiomatic disagreement and I don't think we can reason one another to a synthesis.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#366

Post by matheusmoreira »

XCSme wrote: post #278
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…

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 user…

You may not care about tracking individual people but in order to realize your business advantages you end up doing it anyway. They always put their business needs above those of the users. Increasing conversion rates always trumps user privacy and peace of mind. Claiming businesses care about happy users is just dishonest. They care about bottom line.

Business just shouldn't be able to freely collect mountains of information. They can't be trusted to do it responsibly. Collecting data is a privilege and it can be revoked. If they insist on doing it, we'll find a way to avoid sending the data. If they lock us out for not sending data, we'll send fake data.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#367

Post by agumonkey »

wott wrote: post #331
agumonkey wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sarcastic example you're giving is most likely to be true. I had heated arguments on reddit with people (most likely gamers) being very tense about my dismissal of the need for FTTH. And the telecom companies are just in it for the new market, they couldn't care less about anything else. xDSL was also meant to be high speed for everybody, and it's not the case. And sadly, as long as there's a market, there will…

> And sadly, as long as there's a market, there will be products. Moreover, if there is no market, one will soon be created to fill the void and make some money of any 'underused' resource until it saturates. > I often want to assemble low bandwidth low power (solar powered even) router nodes. Something you could drop in a field and have a mile radius range of wifi (some people on youtube got more than that with a ti…

Agreed, somehow people consider 4G as a requirement for normal life. Being in a low-tech phase I find that a waste but alas.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#368

Post by S_A_P »

Ive long been thinking that the way to "fix" journalism in the US(and possibly rest of the world) is to have apple music/spotify like channels that the major publishers broadcast through. It solves the problem of having 50 different 1 dollar per month subscriptions, and aggregates content in a way that I would never have trouble paying for if it were done correctly. This model is already in place for things like Satellite Radio, Cable TV, the aforementioned apple music spotify, netflix, etc.

Am I the person that needs to build this??!!

Re: The Bullshit Web

#370

Post by mikeash »

closeparen wrote: post #95
throwawaymath wrote: post #31

Earlier 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). No they don't. They really don't need to know any of that. They don't even get a pass on tracking because they're providing a free whatever - I pay for a subscription to the NYT. The business, or a meaningfully substantial…

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.

NYT used to exist only in paper form which had no tracking abilities at all. They may benefit from this but I’m skeptical that they “need” it.
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