The Bullshit Web • Hacker News Board

Re: The Bullshit Web

#411

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 5:41 AM UTC

p1necone wrote: post #269

TeMPOraL wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I don't think people actually waste three orders of magnitude more electricity by loading 10MB vs 10KB (...)

Yeah, they actually waste more in this case. The base cost is that of processing of content, which is linear with size (on a category level; parsing JS may have a different constant factor than displaying an image). But in the typical makeup of a website, just how much stuff can be in the 10KB case? Content + some image + a bit of CSS and maybe a JS tracker. In the 10MB case, you have tons of JS code, a lot of which will keep running in the background. This incurs continuous CPU cost.

> and people don't just flip the power switch as soon as a page load finishes

CPUs have power-saving modes, power supplies can vary their power draw too.

Or, for those with whom such abstract terms as "wastefulness" don't resonate, let me put it in other words: if you ever wondered why your laptop and your smartphone drains its battery so quickly, this is why. All the accumulated software bloat, both web and desktop, is why.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#412

Post by pauljonas » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 5:44 AM UTC

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…

No, it's herd mentality. Because it's what everyone else is doing, it's the standard, it's what you do and to be an outlier in this is to be deluged with how archaic you are and then be swarmed in marketing jargon that breaks down page element interactions to an atomic level.

Meanwhile, users ditch the bloated web pages for apps or if browsing from a laptop or desktop computer, for a curated view delivered by Facebook or Twitter or another service in the long tail (i.e., Tumblr, Pinterest, etc.). The effect may not even be plainly noticeable but it does work on a psychological level. All the cruft and gunk dissuades repeat visits and any desire to return to browse that internet space.

Some online spaces, and mostly in the news vein are even overtly abominable. My local news outlet (azcentral.com) is unbearable to load, with the autoplay video, the barrage of ads, both popovers and the hard elements that take space in display. Leaving just a tiny portion of the screen real estate to actual content that a reader might be interested in.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#413

Post by dm33tri » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 5:53 AM UTC

It's even harder to understand this width advance of modern web technologies. In 90th you had single channel to download unoptimized GIFs and websites used to be built from these images. Now you bundle, minify and gzip all these stylesheets and scripts which are capable of 1000x what you did back then, and then load (usually precached) analytics script from CDN while fetching mp4's in parallel and streaming them on the fly. It's just bad developers. Facebook takes about 100ms to load everything (but still has shitty ui). And they build tools so everyone can do this too. And developers now brag how complicated web is.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#414

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 6:09 AM UTC

buchanae wrote: post #395

Amen! And this article doesn't even touch on the bullshit content – I don't want 10 websites that all say generally the same thing with different layouts (and 10 times more total bullshit consumed). I can't stand the internet today. The experience on mobile is even more unbearable. I want simplicity. Can we all just band together right here and now and create a subnet with a better set of principles? - minimize page…

> - minimize page weight - minimize duplicate content - minimize UI variation - what else?

- allow for (or even encourage) automated processing of content

Re: The Bullshit Web

#415

Post by posting2fast » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 6:10 AM UTC

moolcool wrote: post #8

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.

I don't know why the slack desktop client is so popular. It's almost no different from the web client, but eats more RAM if you already have Chrome open. Just pin Slack in a tab and save your memory

The point would be the same even if nobody used the client except to start it up for measuring bloat.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#416

Post by thinkingemote » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 6:14 AM UTC

makecheck wrote: post #126

We 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…

I use a VPN with a hosts file that is composed of EasyList etc for my phone. It saves me money and battery.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#417

Post by white-flame » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 6:16 AM UTC

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…

In the pre-monetized web, yes the tech guys made things right without money extracted from the web.

Standards & many applications that implemented them (including commercial) were attempted to be designed to make online computer use possible and beneficial. This is the domain of academics, committees, and concerned individuals creating the means of useful computing & communication, outside of parasitic desperation to inject unnecessary rent-seeking lock-ins into everybody's lives.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#418

Post by onion2k » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 6:19 AM UTC

kup0 wrote: post #182

_louisr_ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is both an appeal to people's universal appreciation of efficiency, and a weak denunciation of the modern web. Your argument is 1) that a website's value is the number of words on the page, and 2) that raw text is the highest value data that can be transmitted over the internet, and 3) that inefficiency and wastefulness of bits is a bad thing First off, you need to defend your first two assumptions. Don't websit…

#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?

When the effort to optimize something would be better spent elsewhere.

On the web there are two important points. First, bandwidth isn't always abundant so optimising is worthwhile, and secondly optimising is effectively a negative cost if you just don't include wasteful features in the first place - building optimally is less effort than building wastefully.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#419

Post by rootlocus » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 6:21 AM UTC

thegayngler wrote: post #171

komali2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hilariously, the New York times tries both: you get five or so article reads (with shitloads of tracking), and then you have to pay to read more per month. But if you're paying, the pages don't load any different. You're paying to be mined.

I agree in theory. However, I haven't noticed the slowness in their website and the ads are well done and blend in with the webpage. They may have to redesign/rearchitect their whole website to get what you are asking for. It should be noted that traditional newspapers include ads alongside news content and no one complains. In fact people used to sift through the Sunday NYT simply for the ads.

> the ads are well done and blend in with the webpage

That's called "native advertisement" and it's supposed to trick you into thinking you're reading a genuine article instead of an ad. I actively avoid sites that do this.

> In fact people used to sift through the Sunday NYT simply for the ads.

Back when people couldn't google for stuff, and the ads were useful because they mostly came from local businesses you actually needed once in a while.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#420

Post by mahranch » Wed, Aug 01, 2018, 6:21 AM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #280

mahranch wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The web was intended to be

I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. You cannot say what the web was intended to be because you had no hand in inventing it. You do not know the mind of Tim Berners-Lee.

In fact, I argue the opposite - he had a vision of a global hyperlinked information system. While he wanted the protocol itself to be free (a move away from gopher), the information itself had no such protections. And that is precisely what we have today; it doesn't cost anything to use the WWW protocol. His vision has been fulfilled.

Now, the information (the content) itself is another matter. IP laws exist for a reason, people want to be paid for the content they create. They have ownership of that content. Whether it's the latest episode of game of thrones, a video game IP, or a book I wrote, the law protects my intellectual property. If I want to charge for access to that content, I'm more than within my legal right. Whether it's accessed over WWW, a cable box, or purchased from a book store, it makes no difference to my legal protections.