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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#491

Post by mkirklions »

nickjj wrote: post #490
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…

I don't think 3-10 seconds should be the bar. I spent years using a 14.4k / 28k / 56k modem. That was during the mid and late 90s. Browsing the web where you need to wait 3-10 seconds for everything to load is not a good user experience. It's a colossal waste of time, and today we have so many more reasons to view more pages compared to back then. We should strive for an improvement instead of trying to stick with li…

>Browsing the web where you need to wait 3-10 seconds for everything to load is not a good user experience.

Im a lone owner of a website. I have enough time to accomplish one of 3 things before January

>Finish my Finance App

>update 200 pages to have pictures load based on screen type so you can load in 3 seconds instead of 6.

>Collect and compile data to create 20 more pages, all of which my 3000 subscribers actually come to my page for.

Very quickly you can see why an extra 2 seconds of loading time is not on our mind. Its important to allocate resources effectively, changing my website to load faster is limited value added vs creating content that my users actually want.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#492

Post by notheguyouthink »

DmenshunlAnlsis wrote: post #213
notheguyouthink wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is that doubtful? There's all kinds of examples of tiered subscriptions in the world. I think it would be doubtful because the NYT wouldn't want to explicitly admit all the tracking they are doing. Many reasons, one of which you said. What would the price tag be for them to admit all they are tracking?

Currently the price is free, and comes bundled with uMatrix, and a cookie flush. I’d like to pay the NYT for their journalism, but only with money, not the ability to track me. As a result they get no money, and no tracking.

> Currently the price is free, and comes bundled with uMatrix, and a cookie flush. I’d like to pay the NYT for their journalism, but only with money, not the ability to track me. As a result they get no money, and no tracking.

You misunderstood me. I mean, what would they like you to pay them, for them to be 100% transparent about what they're doing for tracking, what their advertisers are doing and who they are, and possibly stopping all that entirely. Ie, what is it worth to them.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#493

Post by mkirklions »

ryandrake wrote: post #203
soared wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. NYT employs 1,300 people. Totally irrelevant. Why should the number of employees in the company have any bearing on the size or cost of the product? Ford has 5x as many employees as Tesla. Should their cars be 5x as big or 5x more expensive? > NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product They may…

>Why should the number of employees in the company have any bearing on the size or cost of the product? Ford has 5x as many employees as Tesla. Should their cars be 5x as big or 5x more expensive?

This is a bad example. Tesla is a failing/failed car company that cant produce 200k cars per year. Ford has their truck program that sells that in a few months.

>Comparing a digital text product (Moby Dick) with a digital text product (a NYT article) is as close as it gets.

Comparing a book vs a timely article is unfair. NYT produces content daily to encourage shares and people clicking on various links on the website. Links, Images, Videos, comments, etc... None of those are available in dumb text.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#494

Post by mark_l_watson »

My sites are fairly much plain, mostly using a bit of Bootstrap. Because of the new European data protection laws (which I mostly like) I also converted my blogger based blog to generated static resources.

Like so many other people I ignore sites with too much baggage. Many news sites have text only versions if you look.

I sort of have some adds on my main site that are text links to where my books are sold. Advertising does not have to be resource heavy.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#495

Post by norepicycle »

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…

> As my father was a news and politics junkie (as well as a collector of email addresses)

I feel like there's something I'm missing here: something like getting his hands on clever usernames?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#496

Post by sixstringtheory »

krylon wrote: post #470
sixstringtheory wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s nothing more than marketing. Do you ride more because it’s unlimited? When you get to your stop for your office or dinner or whatever, do you go back home and then back again before getting off? Do you go all the way to the end of the line to minimize your cost per mile, then walk back to your actual destination? Of course not, you use it as efficiently as possible to do the thing you used public transit to ac…

I definitely use public transportation more often instead of walking or riding my bicycle than I would if I had to pay per ride.

That wasn’t my point though, you still only use it as much as you need it.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#497

Post by ealhad »

flukus wrote: post #374
itronitron wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe they could send multiple letters and I could have some kind of client that shows me the headlines and allows me to open the articles I'm interested in.

That would be amazing. How come Google hasn't invented something like that yet?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#498

Post by nickjj »

mkirklions wrote: post #491
nickjj wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think 3-10 seconds should be the bar. I spent years using a 14.4k / 28k / 56k modem. That was during the mid and late 90s. Browsing the web where you need to wait 3-10 seconds for everything to load is not a good user experience. It's a colossal waste of time, and today we have so many more reasons to view more pages compared to back then. We should strive for an improvement instead of trying to stick with li…

>Browsing the web where you need to wait 3-10 seconds for everything to load is not a good user experience. Im a lone owner of a website. I have enough time to accomplish one of 3 things before January >Finish my Finance App >update 200 pages to have pictures load based on screen type so you can load in 3 seconds instead of 6. >Collect and compile data to create 20 more pages, all of which my 3000 subscribers actuall…

> Very quickly you can see why an extra 2 seconds of loading time is not on our mind. Its important to allocate resources effectively, changing my website to load faster is limited value added vs creating content that my users actually want.

I understand. I'm also a sole owner of a website where I'm selling a product (video courses for software developers).

My priorities are to give as much value as possible for free and also sell some courses if I can.

According to Google's network tab the DOMContentLoaded time is about 250ms to load any page on my site (which are typically 1,000 to 5,000 word blog posts with some images). From the user's POV, the page loads pretty much instantly. Then about a second later Google Analytics and a social sharing widget pop up, but those happen after the content.

The interesting thing is I really didn't try hard to make this happen. I just stuck to server rendered templates and compressed my assets. I also made an effort to avoid heavy front end libraries and only add javascript / CSS when I needed to. I basically run a heavily modified theme based on Bootstrap with a couple of third party javascript libs (including jquery).

There's a lot of room for improvement but I haven't bothered because it seems good enough. It's very possible to get the perceived load speed of a page to be under 1 second without dedicating a lot of time to it.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#499

Post by throwawaymath »

themacguffinman wrote: post #438
throwawaymath wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's nothing axiomatic about our disagreement here, it's not like I'm unaware of the existence of inefficient businesses. Individual companies may choose to leave money on the table, but industries and markets as a whole do not (not intentionally, anyway). You've just described the status quo, where businesses have to sacrifice their lifeblood to achieve your ideals. Those businesses tend to be beaten by more focu…

I'm not trying to champion anything, I'm speaking my mind. I don't expect the NYT to change because I'm writing an HN comment. If market forces or legislation are insufficient to force companies to respect user privacy across unrelated domains, then I'll rely on my own setup: a Pi-Hole VPN for mobile devices, and uBlock Origin for desktop devices. I happily whitelist domains with non-intrusive ads and respect for Do-Not-Track.

But more to the point, you're presenting an argument which implies the NYT is a business which will be beaten by its competitors if it doesn't track users through their unrelated web history. I don't think that kind of tracking is an existential necessity for the NYT. It's not their core competency. Their core competency is journalism - if they are beaten by a competitor it won't be because the competitor has superior tracking, for several reasons:

1. Journalism is not a winner take all environment,

2. Newspapers were surviving in online media well before this tracking was around,

3. The NYT already has sufficiently many inefficiencies that if they actually cared about user privacy, they could trim the fat elsewhere so they wouldn't have to know to within 0.001% precision whether or not a user will read an entire article just to be profitable.

I really don't think this is too idealistic. It's not like I'm saying they need to abandon advertising altogether. I don't even have a problem with the majority of advertising. It's the poor quality control and data collection that I take issue with. All I'm saying is that they don't need to do what they're doing to be profitable.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#500

Post by ryanianian »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #110
ryanianian wrote: post #23

Sorry but this piece comes across as entitled and whiny. It's easy to point out how bloated and terrible most modern large sites are and guffaw in disgust at the counts of xhttp requests and scripts that are loaded in order to provide no user benefit. But just moaning about it probably won't make the problem go away. Simply rendering text isn't a business-model anymore unfortunately, and publishers are doing everythi…

But you're just defending the ad/tracking part; even without all that pages are still relatively huge and slow. And I sadly don't know either what else apart from whining and moaning the average user could do.

I strongly suspect that 80-90% of the bloat and slowness is due to the ad/tracking parts. Yes, there's bloat with modern web/js tooling but even React and Angular (I think the heaviest of the modern bunch) are on the order of hundreds of kbs gzipped over the wire, and the benefit they give is better ux. "Old web" was fast/bare-html but not great for nontrivial ux.
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