Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Bullshit Web

pxlnv.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 568 posts

Re: The Bullshit Web

#451

Post by subsection1h »

superflyguy wrote: post #440
white-flame wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Swell history lesson, but I don't care about academics and nor do the vast majority of internet users. They can use the internet too, of course, but there's no point moaning about web pages getting larger. I was using the internet in the 90's and it sucked - literally everything about the internet is better today. My life would be no different whether a web page was 5 megs or 5k just like it makes no difference if mo…

> I don't care about academics [...] literally everything about the internet is better today.

The average message posted to comp.lang.c before Eternal September was far batter than the average message posted to HN, Proggit, etc. But many of the former were written by academics, so you probably don't care.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#452

Post by Joeri »

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…

Newspapers did just fine for centuries without tracking. The business is viable without tracking.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#453

Post by KaiserPro »

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…

I used to work at the FT, and we tested a number of hypotheses:

1) faster page loads means better engagement 2) everyone hates popups. 3) everyone hates autoplay

turns out that faster page loads _do_ make user happy, normal non tech savvy users happy. (source: http://engineroom.ft.com/2016/04/04/a-faster-ft-com/)

I don't think the popup experiment has a write up, but people _hate_ popups, even more when they are not relevant.

I was part of the auto play experiment, and whilst a few people really like them, it saves them clicking, the vast majority hate it with a passion.

Auto play is a thing because it boosts ad impressions between 25-80%

So for ad based revenue, yes, I can see why people do this. For subscribing sites, it kills your bottom line. So empirically they either rely too much on ads, or are idiots who don't have evidence to base decisions on.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#454

Post by kennxfl »

bartread wrote: post #225
ChuckMcM wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this rant, you should go the next step: All you need to 'fix' this is a fast loading news website that gets enough paid subscribers to earn enough margin from subscriptions that you can pay for a news staff, an office, and various overheads. That is a longish way of saying that 99.9% of the overhead in any modern web site can be traced almost entirely to the mechanisms by which that web site is attempting to e…

> That is a longish way of saying that 99.9% of the overhead in any modern web site can be traced almost entirely to the mechanisms by which that web site is attempting to extract value from you for visiting/reading. Well, that and the fact that front-end developers just can't seem to exist without pulling in hundreds of kilobytes, or even megabytes, of JS libraries. You actually don't need all that crap to serve adv…

Smart marketing treads the fine line providing rich experiences for their users based on the average internet speed vs annoyance. If the service is free they should try to get 'some value' for the content.

As highlighted, some take it way too far by trying to extract 'maximum value' which ends up being counterproductive.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#455

Post by Joeri »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #241
cheezymoogle wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the wildest things! We had the technological capacity to run Unix systems with several hundred users simultaneously and access at the speed of thought with 26kbps modems back in 1992, complete with instant messaging and personal directories! What happened?!

Another wild thing like this is what you'll notice when you read up on Lisp machines. We had development environments in the 70s/80s that would seem magical today.

I’m reading the book valley of genius where the xerox parc people basically make the same argument. The Xerox Alto’s smalltalk environment still isn’t matched today and the PC experience is much weaker for it.

The problem with those kinds of environments (where everything is editable at runtime using highly expressive langiages) is they assume everyone is a power user and there are no malevolant actors trying to mess up your machine. That’s not what the modern landscape is like.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#456

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

Nice. My own somewhat similar concept:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if...

Re: The Bullshit Web

#457

Post by theelous3 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #356
MrEldritch wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

Tiling wm does not an OS make.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#458

Post by dredmorbius »

moviuro wrote: post #442

I see no one mentioned the extraordinary "Reader mode" of Firefox. [0] It's literaly the one feature for which I stopped using Chrome at work. It's just so damn good. For instance, [1] becomes [2] [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu... [1] https://radiobruxelleslibera.com/2018/06/26/intermediated-of... [2] https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/smexxUICwLXKbzEEbLlIPQ_qGc... (that's a screensho…

FYI, the Google Photos link requests a login.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#459

Post by JBiserkov »

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…

I agree with everything you said. I just have a somewhat different experience with Firefox on Windows 10:

>Firefox is eating 750 MB just keeping this single tab open while I type this.

I have 127 tabs open on Firefox Quantum 61.0.1 (64 bit). It uses ~ 1100 MB spread among 7 processes. I have 6 addons enabled (Decentraleyes, Firefox pioneer, I don't care about cookies, Tab counter, Tree style tab and uMatrix).

Re: The Bullshit Web

#460

Post by boomlinde »

_louisr_ wrote: post #39
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 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…

1 and 2 are your own extrapolations and have nothing to do with the author's arguments. Please point out where the author makes these arguments in case I missed something.

> Don't websites do a lot more than display text?

Yes, evidently, but the author doesn't disagree with this. In fact, the entire premise of the article is that websites do a bunch of useless stuff that have nothing to do with delivering the content you are browsing them for.

> Does HTML/markup not have a magnitude more value than raw text?

As a universal rule there is of course no answer to this. There is a lot of absolutely worthless text on the web. Given the example, though, would you say that the markup is worth more than the text on a website whose primary attraction is written articles? Do you frequently visit websites just to admire their markup?

> And how exactly is being inefficient with something that is abundant a tautologically bad thing?

My time is limited. RAM is limited, CPU time is limited. My mobile data plan is limited. No one is happy with a page loading for 10 seconds for something which should take 1/10000 of that. That's not to say that this is tautologically a bad thing. The author explains why he thinks its bad and I think that people that value their time and resources should agree. If you think that an article loading for 10 seconds is a bad thing, it's bad that an article takes 10 seconds to load. It only becomes tautological once you apply your value system to it, if ever.

Post reply on HN