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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#501

Post by throwawaymath »

rainonmoon wrote: post #287
foepys wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the first, it's sufficient enough to just look at the number of page requests. For the second, I never got explained to me how UX analysis really works for news sites. Isn't it enough to put 2 or 3 people in a room and show them a few variations of the UI? There isn't really much to publishing text, images, and a few graphs. Graphs are a very well explored field, I don't think you can learn more about them by jus…

It absolutely isn't sufficient to look at the number of page requests. How do you discern like-reads vs hate-reads? How do you determine whether someone clicked on an article, read the first line, and then bailed vs read the whole thing? There are a heap of metrics used to determine engagement which factor into the material decisions referred to in the grandparent.

Why do you need to track user behavior across unrelated domains to achieve any of that?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#502

Post by rickycook »

Joeri wrote: post #455
TeMPOraL wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

kinda so did reasonably modern ideas. take active desktop for example! sure it’s more high level, but i believe the quote is that they wanted websites to do “cool things” with the desktop. cringeworthy by today’s standards...

things get more locked down as we develop abstractions that we have more control over

Re: The Bullshit Web

#503

Post by chickenfries »

flukus wrote: post #380
chickenfries wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough but these rants on HN about publishers never seem to contain any examples of publications that are both successful and delivering pages that weigh scarcely more than their plain text equivalent. I think you invite the “false dichotomy” by making the comparison between plain text Moby Dick and the front page of one of the most successful newspapers in the world in 2018. I agree with many of your points but…

> Fair enough but these rants on HN about publishers never seem to contain any examples of publications that are both successful and delivering pages that weigh scarcely more than their plain text equivalent. Examples would be the same publications 10 or 20 years ago. They weren't exactly plain text but they were a lot lighter and the content has not improved measurably in that time. Here's one from the 70's that's s…

I don't care about examples from 10 or 20 years ago, I want examples from the current market.

Minitel isn't a publication? I'm familiar with Minitel, I've read a book on it, but I don't know what you're trying to insinuate by linking it here in a discussion about publishing.

Also, "still going strong?" Minitel was discontinued, in 2012. Because France has the modern internet now.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#504

Post by buchanae »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #414
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

Yes! That's a good one.

I'd also say, probably minimize the use of javascript and dynamic content.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#505

Post by dTal »

jancsika wrote: post #330
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…

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…

The terms are not bullshit. The network does not have the capacity to service everyone at their maximum last-mile data rate, all the time. Bandwidth is a large, but finite resource. There are several ways of addressing this:

-You can divide the total capacity up equally and give everyone dedicated connections that aren't very fat. Nobody likes this, and it's very inefficient because most people aren't using their full bandwidth most of the time.

-You can charge by the byte, on top of the base fee, so that using the system more costs more. It's fair - pricing directly reflects resources consumed - but nobody likes the idea of being nickel-and-dimed whenever they click a link.

-You can do the above, but include some large chunk of data (which is quite cheap) into the base fee, that most people won't go over. Call it a "cap". This works well.

-You can promise "unlimited" data, but start sending nasty letters and/or slowing the connection to a crawl when they go over some prescribed "fair use" amount. This is a data cap in all but name.

Basically, all-you-can-eat stuff is always sold on the basis that you will consume some reasonable amount, because no resource is infinite.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#506

Post by pavel_lishin »

eadmund wrote: post #375
pavel_lishin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know why the slack desktop client is so popular. In-dock notifications and system notifications are my reasons, as well as a dedicated window I can alt-tab to instead of tabbing through browser windows, then navigating to the Slack tab. (I realize that for some people, "hiding" Slack in a pinned tab may be a feature.)

> In-dock notifications and system notifications are my reasons, as well as a dedicated window I can alt-tab to instead of tabbing through browser windows, then navigating to the Slack tab. Emacs-slack can get you all of that:-)

I'm aware of the fact that Emacs is a fully fledged operating system :P

Re: The Bullshit Web

#507

Post by welly »

rhizome wrote: post #145
yathern wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just loaded up a nytimes[1] article too - and only weighed in at 1.0MB. For a 1000 word article. Subsequent reloads dropped it to ~1000KB. I don't think that's too bad, considering there are images in there as well. Now of course, I'm running an ad blocker. I assume the remaining MB that you noticed had come from advertising sources. In which case, bloat isn't the issue, ads are. [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/…

weighed in at 1.0MB. For a 1000 word article. Subsequent reloads dropped it to ~1000KB. You really can't beat savings like that.

That'll knock dollars... no, cents... no half-cents off his ISP bill!

Re: The Bullshit Web

#508

Post by SilasX »

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.

Couldn’t they eg have some trusted proxy server that routes some requests to the real-content NYTimes server and some to the ad server?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#509

Post by majani »

The web is not all bullshit. It's just that certain areas of business online it are incentivized to get bloated and others aren't. I learnt this through personal experience:

On one hand, I own a news site, and on the other hand, I own a price comparison website. The news website started off at a 90% rating on Pagespeed tools but as the ads came in and people complained that the news site looked ancient, that score got whittled down to 30-40% and the page weight also went up by orders of magnitude as well. The price comparison website however, has a 100% rating on Pagespeed tools and has stayed that way because it's goal is to get people to the best priced retailer as quickly as possible.

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