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The 49MB web page

thatshubham.com

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Re: The 49MB web page

#61

Post by sublinear »

xigoi wrote: post #59
sublinear wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty damn sure those videos were put on the page because someone in marketing wanted them. I'm pretty sure then QA complained the videos loaded too slowly, so the preloading was added. Then, the upper management responsible for the mess shrugged their shoulders and let it ship. You're not insightful for noticing a website is dog slow or that there is a ton of data being served (almost none of which is actually…

> Please stop blaming the devs. You're laundering blame. Almost no detail of a web site or app is ever up to the devs alone. If a bridge engineer is asked to build a bridge that would collapse under its own weight, they will refuse. Why should it be different for software engineers?

It's a website and not a bridge. Based on the description given, it's not a critical website either. If it was, the requirements would have specified it must be built differently.

You're not even arguing with me BTW. You're arguing against the entire premise of running a business. Priorities are not going to necessarily be what you value most.

Re: The 49MB web page

#62

Post by nikanj »

xigoi wrote: post #59
sublinear wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty damn sure those videos were put on the page because someone in marketing wanted them. I'm pretty sure then QA complained the videos loaded too slowly, so the preloading was added. Then, the upper management responsible for the mess shrugged their shoulders and let it ship. You're not insightful for noticing a website is dog slow or that there is a ton of data being served (almost none of which is actually…

> Please stop blaming the devs. You're laundering blame. Almost no detail of a web site or app is ever up to the devs alone. If a bridge engineer is asked to build a bridge that would collapse under its own weight, they will refuse. Why should it be different for software engineers?

Because bridge engineers can be sued if the bridge kills people

Re: The 49MB web page

#63

Post by BoneShard »

the_snooze wrote: post #60

It's really hard to consider any kind of web dev as "engineering." Outcomes like this show that they don't have any particular care for constraints. It's throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall YOLO programming.

it's still engineering, just for different constraints - cost & speed.

Re: The 49MB web page

#64

Post by hilbert42 »

CalRobert wrote: post #21
hilbert42 wrote: post #11

These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort. Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load…

Do you think youtube will continue to make it possible to use alternate clients, or eventually go the way of e.g. Netflix with DRM so you're forced to use their client and watch ads?

If Google were just starting YouTube today then DRM would likely be enforced through a dedicated app. The trouble for Google is that millions watch YouTube through web browsers many of whom aren't even using a Google account let alone even being subscribers to a particular YouTube page. Viewership would drop dramatically.

Only several days ago I watched the presenter of RobWords whinging about wanting more subscribers and stating that many more people just watch his presentations than watch and also subscribe.

The other problem YouTube has is that unlike Netflix et al with high ranking commercial content are the millions of small presenters who do not use advertising and or just want to tell the world at large their particular stories. Enforced DRM would altogether ruin that ecosystem.

Re: The 49MB web page

#65

Post by Aurornis »

hilbert42 wrote: post #11

These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort. Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load…

> Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.

They know this. They also know that web surfers like you would never actually buy a subscription and you have an ad blocker running to deny any revenue generation opportunities.

Visitors like you are a tiny minority who were never going to contribute revenue anyway. You’re doing them a very tiny favor by staying away instead of incrementally increasing their hosting bills.

Re: The 49MB web page

#66

Post by sublinear »

zahlman wrote: post #43
sublinear wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty damn sure those videos were put on the page because someone in marketing wanted them. I'm pretty sure then QA complained the videos loaded too slowly, so the preloading was added. Then, the upper management responsible for the mess shrugged their shoulders and let it ship. You're not insightful for noticing a website is dog slow or that there is a ton of data being served (almost none of which is actually…

"Developers" here clearly refers to the entire organization responsible. The internal politics of the foo.com providers are not relevant to Foo users.

I agree except for your definition of "developers". I see this all the time and can't understand why the blame can't just be the business as a whole instead of singling out "developers". In fact, the only time I ever hear "developers" used that way it's a gamer without a job saying it.

The blame clearly lies with the contradictory requirements provided by the broader business too divorced from implementation details to know they're asking for something dumb. Developers do not decide those.

Re: The 49MB web page

#68

Post by curtisblaine »

pibaker wrote: post #16
neya wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is valid if journalism was actually journalism instead of just ripping off trending stories from HN and Reddit and rehashing it with sloppy AI and calling it a day and putting in 4 lines of text buried inside 400 ads.

I don't like the state of journalism either but you realize this is a vicious cycle, no? People not paying for news (by buying newspaper, or more importantly paying for classified ads) leading to low quality online reporting leading to people not wanting to pay for online news.

I never understand this type of comment. People don't pay for news so newspapers (which by the way have pay walls) are forced to degrade their service. It seems strange to me. If I have a restaurant and people don't want to pay for my food, making even worse food with worse service doesn't seem a good solution. If I write books and people don't buy them, writing worse books doesn't make my sales better. Why journalists are different? They sell a service for money like all the others, but for some reason they have a special status and it's totally understandable that they respond to bad sales with a worse product. And actually, somehow it's our fault as customers. For some reason we should keep buying newspapers even if we don't think it's worth to save them from themselves.

Re: The 49MB web page

#69

Post by jkestner »

sublinear wrote: post #54
hobs wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the perspective of the devs, they have a responsibility for saying something literally wont fly anywhere, ever, saying the business is responsible for every bad decision is a complete abrogation of your responsibilities.

Why don't you tell your boss or team something like that and see how well that flies. The responsibility of the devs is to deliver what was asked. They can and probably do make notes of the results. So does QA. So do the other stakeholders. On their respective teams they get the same BS from everyone who isn't pleased with the outcome. Ultimately things are on a deadline and the devs must meet requirements where the…

Maybe everyone’s got a different situation, but when a different department tried to put ActiveX avatars all over their site, though it offended me from a UX perspective, I was able to get higher ups to reject it by pointing out that it would shut out 20% of their customers.

We always have discussions here about how you have to learn to talk to communicate your value to clients in a language they understand. Same goes for internal communications.

Re: The 49MB web page

#70

Post by xigoi »

jdross wrote: post #8
ronsor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm going to block the ads anyway (or just leave), so if they're trying to find profitable ads, they may need to revise their strategy.

“I’m going to either steal your work in a way you don’t consent to, or not consume it” isn’t really great. The alternative is paywalls

Steal? Their server gave me some HTML and it’s up to my user agent to present it however I want.
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