The Bullshit Web

by codesections • 8 years ago

1017 550 8 years ago

modzu• 8 years ago

i duno, if a site is taking more than a second to load, goodbye! then again surely most of the hn crowd uses something akin to ublock. what of those other poor souls

edhelas• 8 years ago

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.

pseudocook2• 8 years ago

Desktop Slack runs on Electron, no? Which essentially lets web developers develop a "native-ish" cross-platform app, without learning a whole new platform.

There is a long, long history of attempts to make good, cross-platform, native apps. In the late 1990s there was a company called Visix that had such a library that worked on Windows and Unix. There have been Windows implementations of Motif/XWindows. There was of course Java/JWT. These days there is Qt. None of these seem to have really caught fire.

edit: I wrote Mac but I meant Unix

peterwwillis• 8 years ago

Yeah, because cross-platform is a PITA. The reason web apps are popular is they're thin-terminals. You write your business logic on your mainframe/terminal server (linux vps) and the web app just handles the user interface. You maintain less portable code, deployment and upgrade is easier, and it simplifies the user experience a bit. The downside being network issues and supporting the server.

user59944615• 8 years ago

Qt and Java can do cross platform software, however it's not possible to make a UI that's usable on desktop, tablet and mobile. You will end up creating separate apps.

Qt is actually really impressive in my opinion, it's possible to recompile a desktop software for mobile, sometimes without any code change at all.

moolcool2• 8 years ago

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

pavel_lishin3• 8 years ago

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.)

nunez• 8 years ago

you can only do video conf through the app

SCdF• 8 years ago

I find it runs faster and is more stable in the desktop client, but I switched a couple of years ago so that may no longer matter (also ymmv etc).

posting2fast• 8 years ago

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

slowmovintarget• 8 years ago

I'd be saying "Yeah!" along with you, but that client is also a video chat and audio calling app, not just text and images.

There's bloatware out there, and this may even qualify, but it isn't just text chat. (Why would you use the desktop client for text chat anyway?)

fermuch• 8 years ago

Skype also has audio and video, with custom codecs even, and p2p, yet it wasn't even close to using the very real 1gb of ram slack consumes

(I'm talking about the old desktop client, not the new electron based one)

lstodd• 8 years ago

audio/video work fine in chromium.

jstewartmobile3• 8 years ago

My GMail tab runs between 225MB and 400MB+. And I used to think Java's memory usage was bad...

cozzyd2• 8 years ago

If I leave gmail open too long, it starts eating 100% of CPU for some reason (Firefox on Linux).

ilaksh• 8 years ago

It contains Chromium in it's entirety, which is a contemporary full featured browser, which is actually in a way a complete operating system.

petermcneeley• 8 years ago

Everyone demands that the services of the internet have zero explicit cost. This means that all the cost is borne implicitly.

cheezymoogle21• 8 years ago

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, but the page was 5.9mb. That's about 4kb per word without including the gateway (which is required if you're not using social media). Including the gateway, that's about 8kb per word, which is actually about the size of the actual content of the article itself.

So all told, to read just one article from the New York Times, I had to download the equivalent of ten copies of Moby Dick. That's about 4,600 pages. That's approaching the entirety of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, without appendices.

If I check the NY Times just 4 times a day and read three articles each time, I'm downloading 100mb worth of stuff (83 Moby-Dicks) to read 72kb worth of plaintext.

Even ignoring first-principles ecological conservatism, that's just insanely inefficient and wasteful, regardless of how inexpensive bandwidth and computing power are in the west.

EDIT: I wrote a longer write-up on this a while ago on a personal blog, but don't want it to be hugged to death:

http://txti.es/theneedforplaintext

soared6• 8 years ago

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 with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough).

If Moby Dick was being rewritten and optimized every single day it would be a few mb. Its not, so you can't compare the two.

Yes NYT should be lighter, no your comparison is not meaningful. A better comparison would by Moby Dick to the physical NYT newspaper.

zajd3• 8 years ago

They need data to produce the product

[citation needed]

There's no reason they need to use Javascript to track user behavior down to "how long have they read this article".

throwawaymath6• 8 years ago

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 with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough).

No they don't. They really don't need to know any of that. They don't even get a pass on tracking because they're providing a free whatever - I pay for a subscription to the NYT. The business, or a meaningfully substantial core of it, is viable without tracking.

It would be nice if the things I pay for didn't start stuffing their content with bullshit. What and who do I have to pay to get single second page loads? It's not a given that advertising has to be so bloated and privacy-invasive. Various podcasts and blogs (like Daring Fireball) plug the same ad to their entire audience each post/episode for set periods of time. If you're going to cry about needing advertising then take your geographic and demographic based targeting. But no war of attrition will get me to concede you need user-by-user tracking.

You want me to pay for your content? Fine, I like it well enough. You want to present ads as well? Okay sure, the writing and perspectives are worth that too I suppose. But in addition to all of this you want to track my behavior and correlate it to my online activity that has nothing to do with your content? No, that's ridiculous.

paulsutter• 8 years ago

You’re right about the problem: web pages tend to scale with the size of the organization serving them, not the size of the content. But this is the failure, not a defense.

It’s a big problem on mobile and the reason I read HN comments before the article.

NYT employs 1,300 people

mvdwoord• 8 years ago

They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough).

I disagree. They need journalists, and they need to find some way to monetize. Your argument implies there is no other way than to add user tracking. Sure, images take up space, but I refuse to believe the current way of the web is the only viable option.

cheezymoogle21• 8 years ago

A random archive of the New York Times frontpage in 2005 is 300kb. Articles were probably comparable in size.

Are you honestly saying that the landscape of the internet and/or the staffing needs of the NY Times has changed so drastically that they actually needed a 22x increase in size to deliver fundamentally text-based reporting?

goatlover3• 8 years ago

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 with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough).

This just seems like such an abuse of what the web was meant to be. I can imagine the horror people in the 90s would have experienced if they new what JS was going to be used for when perusing news sites.

Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better keeping the web as a document platform without any scripting, and creating a separate one for apps.

Anyway, an alternative model news sites could use is to let users choose which content they want to pay for. That's a way to track which content users prefer.

kingbirdy• 8 years ago

The New York Times existed for 145 years from its founding in 1851 to the creation of its website in 1996, and it got by just fine without tracking pixels in all those years.

jaredklewis2• 8 years ago

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 with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough).

Nonsense. I subscribe to the NYT so that I can read the news. Nothing about that necessitates tracking which users read which articles.

If the NYT uses page view data for anything other than statistics for their advertising partners, it's a shame. I don't want the NYT to tailor write their articles to maximize page views, time spent, or any other vanity statistic; if I felt like reading rage bait fed to me by an algorithm personally customized for all my rage buttons, there is plenty of that elsewhere.

NYT's differentiating factor is that they are one of the few businesses left that pays people to conduct actual journalism. If they give up on that, then I imagine their customers will just go to buzzfeed or wherever.

ryandrake3• 8 years ago

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 want this but they don’t need it. They successfully produced their product in the past without it.

If Moby Dick was being rewritten and optimized every single day it would be a few mb.

Irrelevant and likely false. If anything, books and other text media tend to get smaller after subsequent editing and revising.

A better comparison would by Moby Dick to the physical NYT newspaper.

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

LolNoGenerics• 8 years ago

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 with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough).

That's analytics. The marketing stuff that is causing the bloat isn't doing that much in comparison. Trackers are often coded very wasteful and are redundant by nature. You can have easily dozens to hundreds of them all doing the same stuff just with different APIs. It is insane and out of control and has absolutely nothing to do with gathering insights about your app and improving. It is pure external 3rd party marketing.

kdl20kxkrk• 8 years ago

NYT employs 1,300 people.

See 2 in the article. A sample:

“As Graeber observed in his essay and book, bullshit jobs tend to spawn other bullshit jobs for which the sole function is a dependence on the existence of more senior bullshit jobs:“

I work for one of the vacation rentals

No reason private owners couldn’t be doing the work over email. But certain fetishized models of doing, in this case cloud and web apps, get the focus.

It’s all for eyeballs and buy in at scale to justify the bullshit. “Look everyone is watching us talk up this shit! Better keep justifying it, bringing them into our flock!”

It’s turned us all into corporate sycophants. Religious conviction isn’t limited to belief in sky wizards

Anything sufficiently magical to the layman will instill blind allegiance

And despite all the smart people here, life as is seems magical and there’s a lot of blind buy-in

Joeri3• 8 years ago

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

_louisr_5• 8 years ago

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 websites do a lot more than display text? Does HTML/markup not have a magnitude more value than raw text? And how exactly is being inefficient with something that is abundant a tautologically bad thing?

cheezymoogle21• 8 years ago

1. A website's value is the amount of information that it provides to the end user. I would argue that the entirety of the works of Shakespeare or the 1911 Brittanica Encyclopedia provides more information than a high-definition picture of Donald Trump grimacing at EU leaders or an autoplaying ad for Doritos Locos Tacos NEW AT TACO BELL. As far as supplemental uses, at the end of the day, people are using plaintext to communicate with other people. Images and videos are secondary. If that ever changes, then society is already doomed as literacy is fundamental to the maintenance of technology.

2. Raw text is the highest value data/information return that can be transmitted over the internet. There's a reason that Morse Code and APRS are still around: they're reliable, appropriate tech, and require little to no middlemen outside of the transceivers themselves.

3. If wantonly (namely, for no enduringly good reason) increasing the amount of entropy in the universe isn't tautologically bad to you, then I really doubt that any argument would sway you to the contrary.

Concerning the relative value of HTML and CSS, yes, you could argue that UX matters in that department, but even the most bloated static HTML/CSS page is going to pale dramatically in comparison to the size of what's considered acceptable throughput today.

kup02• 8 years ago

#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 efficiently and non-wastefully not a good idea for its own sake?

boomlinde2• 8 years ago

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.

pc862• 8 years ago

Comparing the raw text of a fiction novel to the code of a website is a pretty asinine comparison, honestly.

Pete_D2• 8 years ago

Maybe you'd prefer comparing the code of a website to the amount of useful content on the website, which OP also did. Taking "I'm downloading 100mb worth of stuff (83 Moby-Dicks) to read 72kb worth of plaintext" at face value, we could also say that 0.072% of the data transferred is useful, or, equivalently, that 99.928% of it is crap.

sgustard• 8 years ago

Completely agreed. I could continue by comparing it to the amount of bandwidth in a 30-minute CNN broadcast, all to read a few thousand words at me.

yathern• 8 years ago

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/2018/07/31/us/politics/facebook-poli...

cheezymoogle21• 8 years ago

Are you also running noscript? I'm running a DNS sinkhole and still get 3mb on reloads.

iforgotpassword2• 8 years ago

That distinction is nonsense. The ads are part of the page and are no more or less bloat then the rest of the useless junk that gets embedded. It's deliberately put there by the NY times, they don't end up there by accident.

rhizome2• 8 years ago

weighed in at 1.0MB. For a 1000 word article. Subsequent reloads dropped it to ~1000KB.

You really can't beat savings like that.

zanny• 8 years ago

I must say, despite what I imagine is a good bit of traffic the instant load times on your site were a joy to behold. I never get to experience that kind of speed on the "modern" web. Even HN loads orders of magnitude slower than that.

cheezymoogle21• 8 years ago

Not my website, but please send along thanks and awareness to @thebarrytone on Twitter!

ChuckMcM5• 8 years ago

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 extract value from you for visiting/reading.

If people would visit with a 56K modem and deal with a 3 - 10 second page load, then that is the bar. And any spare bandwidth you might have is available for the web site to exploit in some way to generate revenue. The more bandwidth between you and them, the more ways they can come up with to exploit that bandwidth for additional surveillance, ads, or analytics that will get them more money.

When you are the customer, which to say it is your purchasing of a subscription or articles is the only revenue the site needs in order to survive, then the things that retain you as a customer have the highest priority (like fast page load times, minimal bandwidth usage).

But when you are a data cow, a random bit of insight into a picture much bigger than you can comprehend, a pixel in a much larger tapestry, or an action droplet in a much larger river of action. Well then there isn't really any incentive to make your life better, as long as the machine we have milking you for data can get even a couple of molecules more of that precious data milk without scaring you out of the barn. Well we'll build right up to that limit.

TeMPOraL20• 8 years ago

Hence the rant mentioning Molochian economy, under which we operate. And that reference explains in depth why this is a very hard problem.

I like the rant too. Except maybe the bit about sending content at the speed of humans - I for one would like to take lightweight, bullshit-free content as fast as it can be sent, to pipe it to further processing on my end, in the never-ending quest to automate things in my life.

komali23• 8 years ago

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.

bartread• 8 years ago

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 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, and most third party tracking services involve their own possibly bulky JS lib[1]. The thing is, given the slim margins on ad-serving - whilst I don't condone it - I can see why people don't bother to put in the extra effort to slim their payloads.

[1]And if you have a particularly idiotic marketing department they might want, say, tracking to be done in three or four different ways, requiring three or four different libraries/providers. This is not merely cynicism: I encountered exactly this situation at a gig a few years back.

sogen• 8 years ago

NPR text?

eksemplar• 8 years ago

The most profitable news paper in my country, didn’t have a website with articles or news stories on it until earlier this year. Their page was something from the 90ies (it was probably newer), and all it really offered was info about the paper and a way to buy it.

What they do, that other Danish papers don’t, is write lengthy meaty articles that takes time to read because they actually teach you something new. There was a story on Trumps connections to Russia, it was three full pages long, and we’re talking old school news paper format, so that’s what? 10 a4 pages worth of text?

The paper only comes out once a week, because it takes time to write, but also because it takes time to read.

I’m not sure where I am going with this, I just think it’s interesting how they’ve increased their subscription amounts while not really giving two shits about the bullshit web.

They may give two shits about the bullshit web now of course, having gotten a webpage with articles. I don’t know though, I’m a subscriber, but I haven’t visited their site yet.

madeofpalk• 8 years ago

All you need

You say that as if it's easy. "All you need" is to have a product that users what to pay for. But I think, all the various tries and attempts has proven that users aren't really that keen to pay for content online, at scale.

nickjj2• 8 years ago

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 limitations from 20 years ago.

The real problem is people developing sites now give zero fucks about resource constraints. This is exactly like lottery winners who went from being poor to having 50 mil in their pocket but then end up broke in 3 years because they have no idea how to deal with constraints.

It's also a completely different type of person who is running these sites today. Back in the day you made a site to share what you've learned. Now you have "marketing people" who want to invade your privacy, track every mouse movement and correlate you to a dollar amount instead of providing value.

ksec2• 8 years ago

Or what if, we allow tracking and ads, with native speed?

There is the problem of Network that won't / cant be fixed in any short term. Then the problem with Rendering and Reflow.

The first one being a long time before everyone gets 1Gbps internet, the 2nd being even if you have 1Gbps internet it will still be slow due to all the mini scripts.

What if the fonts were there in the first place?

What if the browser actively tack every mouse movement, links etc, bringing 80-90% of all the tracking scripts datapoint, and doing so natively, sending back the data to website as requested.

No more 3 - 5MB of Scripts downloaded per site, no more CPU running of these scripts, no more 1MB of fonts. And they don't cause the page to jank. You get Butterly smooth webpages while still getting Ads.

My biggest problem is with the idea of extending the Web via Javascript and everything should be Javascript only. Rather than extending the Web Browser native function.

Unfortunately this is an idea that Apple may not like, even if the data are anonymised.

birksherty• 8 years ago

They don't need paid subscribers. Physical papers and tv have been supported by ads without tracking for decades. Companies pay for space or time.

Internet allowed advertisers to track so now we have this BS. They had many years to fix this. But tracking is the business of many companies like google and facebook. Now lot of people uses ad blocker and it's increasing.

jiveturkey• 8 years ago

data cow.

thank you

gooseus2• 8 years ago

I can't agree more with the points you make, I've spent a decent amount of time and effort reducing the overhead of my blog, for example - https://goose.us/thoughts/on-the-purpose-of-life/

That page includes images and "embedded" youtube videos, but loads 454kb of 3,187 words with 10 requests in 450-600ms - if anyone has any suggestions on how to reduce that further, I'd love to hear.

Going to bookmark that txti.es service for the future, definitely seems useful for publishing simple content without needing to fit it into a blog theme.

overcast2• 8 years ago

I'd start with the 100+KB PNG images. None of those pictures are complex, they can be compressed much more.

Rjevski2• 8 years ago

Ditch the "embedded" videos. Use a screenshot linking to the videos directly.

Embedded videos still load a ton of shit and track visitors without their consent.

chickenfries6• 8 years ago

You want to compare plain text to a newspaper, which even in paper form, people expect to contain pictures and advertisements.

krrrh• 8 years ago

I support your effort to make Moby-Dicks the football-field-like unit of measurement for text-focused data. It’s close enough to the 1.44 MB floppy disk to handle easy mental conversion of historical rants, and half of the people reading this have probably never held one of those. I still remember downloading a text version of a 0.9 Moby-Dick book from some FTP site and carrying it around on a floppy so I could read it on whatever computer was handy.

That aside, the most shocking part of your analysis is how inefficient the nytimes was at caching resources for your reload.

userbinator3• 8 years ago

For a rather more technical comparison, 4,600 pages is more than the size of Intel's x86/64 Software Developer's Manual, which is ~3-4k pages.

Gravityloss3• 8 years ago

I don't know how many people here read usenet or were on old mailing lists. You could have removed a some hard edges in usability and everything would have been connected to phones with monochrome text displays back in the nineties already. They didn't even provide decent email experience.

But instead we got the technology developing through some ringtone stuff advertised on TV.

I guess it's something that you can instantly show to your friends.

cheezymoogle21• 8 years ago

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?!

skepticmoron• 8 years ago

Your math does not add up. It is 1 * (6.6 + 3 * 5.9) + 3 * (5 + 3 * 5.9) == 92.4. Unless you are speaking about approximations obviously.

adamsea• 8 years ago

IMHO you are confusing data with information with knowledge. And mixing mediums. You can't compare a novel - the plainest of plain-text mediums, with the front page online of a major news organization in 2018 - of course it will be interactive content, its an entirely different medium, a different market, and different sets of user expectations and competition.

https://www.quora.com/What%E2%80%99s-the-difference-between-...

DATA: a "given" or a fact; number; picture represents something in real world raw materials in production of information

INFORMATION: Data that have meaning in context Data related Data after manipulation

KNOWLEDGE: familiarity, awareness and understanding of someone or something acquired through experience or learning it is a concept mainly for humans unlike data and information.

liquidwax2• 8 years ago

I first realised how heavy these pages are when I disabled javascript. Things load in the blink of an eye. \Most\ pages work and the web remains largely usable.

cjohansson• 8 years ago

Yes this is my experience as well, JavaScript is often the key antagonist. Unfortunately many websites require JavaScript to function

freediver2• 8 years ago

bbc.co.uk will load just fine without JS and actually be more enjoyable (IMO) than JS version.

cnn.com fails miserably without JS.

dri_ft2• 8 years ago

My pet comparisons for everything being too big nowadays are Mario 64 (8mb!), Super Mario World (512kb!), and Super Mario (32kb!!).

kevin_thibedeau• 8 years ago

NoScript cuts the bullshit down to 1.35 MB with all scripts blocked and it's still readable. I can barely tolerate the web without it.

kodablah2• 8 years ago

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 used enough by the common user, they'd just alienate them (e.g. my scrape/front for Google search makes it clear which results the app has a friendly scrape/front for).

0 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/82

cheezymoogle21• 8 years ago

I've often toyed with the idea of using multi-user systems over SSH running Gopher and Lynx to achieve something like this.

In the process, it would also decentralize communities and establish digital equivalents of coffee shops (i.e. places to work in public and meet strangers)--basically SDF, but deployable on Raspberry Pis with more modern userland toys (i.e. software actually designed to be multi-user on the same system).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System

Pete_D2• 8 years ago

Sounds a bit like tedunangst's miniwebproxy[0]. I've been wondering about writing either something like it or a youtube-dl-like "article-dl" for my own use, but haven't quite been annoyed enough into doing it yet.

[0] https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/miniwebproxy (self-signed cert)

dredmorbius6• 8 years ago

Nice. My own somewhat similar concept:

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

aalleavitch• 8 years ago

Moby Dick doesn’t have any pictures or video.

Audiovisual media has value.

BLKNSLVR2• 8 years ago

Audiovisual media of value has value.

Audiovisual media that I choose to donate my bandwidth towards downloading may have value.

Audiovisual media in and of itself has no value.

Audiovisual media that automatically loads, thus slowing down the loading of everything else, has negative value.

conanbatt• 8 years ago

Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text

How many times did you read moby dick online.

lifeformed• 8 years ago

The 100mb pays the bills for the other 72kb of text.

textmode3• 8 years ago

"I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb."

   ftp -4o 1.htm https://www.nytimes.com

   du -h 1.htm

   206K

For the author, 206K somehow grew to 6.6M.

Could it have anything to do with the browser he is using?

Does it automatically load resources specified by someone other than the user, without any user input?

Above I specified www.nytimes.com. I did not specify any other sources. I got what I wanted: text/html. It came from the domain I specified. (I can use a client that does not do redirects.)

But what if I used a popular web browser to download the front page?

What would I get then? Maybe I would get more than just text, more than 206K and perhaps more from sources I did not specify.

If the user wants application/json instead of text/html, NYTimes has feeds for each section:

    curl  https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/$1/index.jsonp

where $1 is the section name, e.g., "world".

The user can use the json to create the html page she wants, client-side. Or she can let a browser javascript engine use it to construct the page that someone else wants, probably constructing it in a way that benefits advertisers.

smadge3• 8 years ago

I don’t think there is anything wrong with user agents downloading resources (like images and stylesheets) linked to by an html document. It is the providers, not the user agents, who have violated the trust of users by including unnecessary scripts, fonts, spyware, advertisements, etc.

userbinator3• 8 years ago

but don't want it to be hugged to death:

Incidentally, this is also another reason for keeping pages small --- bandwidth costs. I remember when free hosts with quite miniscule monthly bandwidth and disk space allotments were the norm, and kept my pages on those as small as possible.

freyr• 8 years ago

Bad comparison, Moby Dick never tracked your activity across the web and sold your data to advertisers.

krzrak• 8 years ago

mb

I think you didn't mean milibits, but megabytes (MB). 1.2 mb = 1.5e-10 MB.

PurpleRamen• 8 years ago

to read just one article from the New York Times, I had to download the equivalent of ten copies of Moby Dick.

But how many Mona Lisas are this?

norepicycle• 8 years ago

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?

JoshuaRLi• 8 years ago

Well said.

cascom• 8 years ago

you only need to use a wifi connection on an airplane to see how painful things are - it's like a time warp

pseudocook2• 8 years ago

I've done Remote Desktop from an airplane and that was actually quite snappy

olyjohn• 8 years ago

The sad thing is that it's not a time warp. It's how a millions of people still browse the web today. I know people who are still on 1.5Mb DSL, who are only a couple miles from the city center. Not only is the line limited to 1.5Mb, but they are so deteriorated, that you can't get speeds over 768Kb. It's extremely common any time you get just a little tiny bit outside of the city.

cozzyd2• 8 years ago

Or go to Antarctica. A lot of "normal" web pages don't load.

tannhaeuser2• 8 years ago

It's already painful on less-than-ideal hotel WiFi where, worse, people tend to go to new/uncached content such as maps, weather sites, and regional stuff.

pmarreck• 8 years ago

I am increasingly encountering news sites that detect ad blocking software and (understandably) refuse to show me their content as a result but the problem is that I enabled ad-blocking on those sites to begin with because they were loading nasty javascript ads on the fly which pegged my CPU!

As a web dev, I feel extremely conscious about what I'd call "javascript library hygiene", and I feel that whoever's in charge of many of the news sites out there, just does not give a shit.

Respect my computer's resources and you'll get your ads re-enabled.

simmons2• 8 years ago

I've noticed that a lot of sites will end up using 100% CPU usage on their Chrome tab. I haven't investigated, but I do wonder what sort of faulty design leads to this. You occasionally hear talk of sites using your CPU to mine cryptocurrency, but I'm more inclined to suspect lousy programming.

I sometimes wish I had an easy way in Chrome to restrict a tab to, say, 5% CPU, for the cases where the CPU usage is clearly not adding any value. Just so I can get through an article without the fan ramping up.

lainga• 8 years ago

  renice 19 ?

paulie_a• 8 years ago

I've noticed that trend also. Those are websites I keep a mental note to not visit. They usually have bottom of the barrel ads anyways and shitty content.

moolcool2• 8 years ago

Mirror: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vcwVnj...

nostromo• 8 years ago

It's not just publishers. My current org uses SalesForce and it's frustratingly slow. Opening a single record takes several seconds as every single interface element is generated dynamically and then populated, seemingly one at a time.

When it's finally done loading, you click on a dropdown, and then the dropdown just shows you a loading spinner, as your client asks the server what should be populated in the dropdown menu. And of course it takes another second. Clicking virtually anything, including back (which should be instantaneous on a proper webapp), will present you with yet another loading spinner and a multi-second delay.

I understand the benefits of building webapps this way, but the benefits primarily accrue to the developers of the app and not to the customer.

stupidcar• 8 years ago

Saleforce's problem is that its presentation layer is a giant pile of legacy code, which can be fundamentally changed, because there's a gazillion extensions and customisations that rely on it working the way it currently does. Having worked a bit with it, there's absolutely nothing about it that "benefits" developers, anymore than having to maintain a VB6 app "benefits" developers.

Done right, a modern web app should be better for both developers and users. The one benefit of the crazy shit described in the article is that if you don't weigh down your page with a multiple MB of ad-network and analytics scripts, then it can be incredibly fast.

goatlover3• 8 years ago

Done right, a modern web app should be better for both developers and users.

Right, and you also don't need to make a text-based site an SPA or use any frontend framework. The web was made for documents, so no need for those kinds of sites to be apps.

_louisr_5• 8 years ago

SalesForce slowness does not equate to "all customers of web apps are getting a bad deal".

Go look at reelgood.com. Imagine if Salesforce worked like that. It should be clear as day that this is a SalesForce problem, not a modern-web problem.

textmode3• 8 years ago

Salesforce uses a large quantity of DNS indirection, more than even the large CDNs. I measure the amount of lookups that sites and apps require, and the delay it causes. Most sites on the www only require two lookups.

This is perhaps an example of "... the benefits primarily accrue to the developers of the app and not to the customer."

tim333• 8 years ago

Opening a single record takes several seconds

that sounds more like a database delay rather than loading the interface

tenaciousDaniel• 8 years ago

I agree with the spirit of the article, in that we should be striving for a leaner web.

But last year I had to build an iOS SDK. As an SDK, we wanted it to be as small as humanly possible. It came out to around 12mb, which is obviously too large. So I tried removing literally everything but one file, and it came out to 10mb. So an iOS package, compiled, with only one class, comes out to 10 megabytes.

Yes, the web can improve, but in the grand scheme of things I don't think it's as dire as some make it out to be.

jlg23• 8 years ago

I dare to disagree: 10MB for a single-class-app is "as dire as some make it out to be".

For comparison: Doom 2 came on 4 1.44MB floppy disks, Duke Nukem 3D on 13. Full games, including all assets....

going into a quiet corner for some weeping

slx26• 8 years ago

yeah. and if it was only the mbs, well, ok. everyone prefers hd to sd video. but the real problem is that the extra mbs we see are mostly things that we don't need, that don't add anything, that we would be better without, and that in many cases are completely unjustified and do not only hinder the user, but also the very own developers (who sometimes are so lost that don't even realize themselves).

erik_seaberg• 8 years ago

1 MB RAM was enough to run the Space Shuttle.

mikeabraham• 8 years ago

Amen to every word except this sentence. "Better choices should be made by web developers to not ship this bullshit in the first place."

No developer I know, web or otherwise, wants to do any of this, and all of them are religious in their use of ad blockers and autoplay stoppers.

This is the kind of stuff developers are forced to do with guns to their heads by the PMs and marketing teams that actually determine the user experience.

wildrhythms2• 8 years ago

I agree with all of this and just want to add that, for every developer who will speak out and crusade against "webpage pollution", there are about a dozen who will not and are viciously seeking employment. I'm often terrified of this.

zerb• 8 years ago

Some of the worst offenders are logging webservices. We've replaced a simple text file with a bloated site that requires mousing around, does not support grepping, etc.

waivek• 8 years ago

This static website seems to be down.

Archive link:

http://web.archive.org/web/20180731143228/https://pxlnv.com/...

nickheer4• 8 years ago

Thank you. This is so embarrassing.

pmlnr• 8 years ago

There's nothing embarrassing about it; I'm yet to see a WordPress based site which was able to withstand the Hug of ackerNews, though SuperCache should have helped.

For a WordPress site, yours is slim and very fast.

tarr112• 8 years ago

Not only that, but it also has 2 trackers on it (google analytics and carbonads). Hard to take this argument seriously.

nickheer4• 8 years ago

I don't use Google Analytics, and Carbon's script is restricted by my CSP to showing the display ad. They also have a reasonable privacy policy where they're not tracking users or generating libraries of behavioural data, as far as I know.

Synaesthesia• 8 years ago

Still, his site is lightweight and loads quick.

ryanianian3• 8 years ago

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 everything they can to actually make their content profitable.

Look: I hate the modern web as much as anyone and I always browse with ad-blocking on. But I turn it off for sites that I get real value from, and I pay monthly membership fees to news sites that I believe respect me as a visitor. My way of working isn't super great for me or for publishers (and I doubt most users turn off adblock for sites they value).

I was hoping this article would show some empathy for publishers and why they would start down the road of such user-hostile behavior. A complete piece would paint a vision for how to end the madness with a solution that is acceptable both to publishers and viewers. I don't know what that solution is, but I strongly doubt that just moaning and counting xhttp requests is part of it.

iforgotpassword2• 8 years ago

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.

ryanianian3• 8 years ago

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.

krapp2• 8 years ago

Simply rendering text isn't a business-model anymore unfortunately, and publishers are doing everything they can to actually make their content profitable.

If they can't come with a business model that works on the web then they're welcome to leave the web and go back to the printing press. The web wasn't made to provide a stable platform for monetizing content, they have literally every other media paradigm ever created for that.

ryanianian3• 8 years ago

You're also welcome to leave the site and not return. You're not entitled to their content on whatever terms you decide are fair or not.

soared6• 8 years ago

Have you ever seen this discussed outside of HN or dev-centric subreddits? Your average user doesn't care about this 'issue' at all, and thats why it won't ever change.

Proof the author doesn't relate to any typical user:

I’m not asking much of it; I have opened a text-based document on the web

Nobody besides devs would open a website and think "Oh this a text-based document opened in a web browser". Its a website, not a word doc.

agumonkey7• 8 years ago

Indirectly yes, they will ask why their computer is slow. Then they'll buy a new one and accept the salespitch for fiber gbps link.

ps: you all must understand that the average user believe in tech, if the web is slow, it can't be google's fault; if the salesman spread that 'of course you need a machine that is web capable' all they'll care is that it's not too expensive and they'll buy the damn machine, and maybe throw the old one out. source: my recycling bin.

TeMPOraL20• 8 years ago

Wish this would be pinned on top of all such discussions.

This is precisely what's happening. In the mind of regular user, the web looks like it's supposed to, because they don't have enough technical knowledge to correctly understand what's happening. Users accept what they get, because they don't understand it. And as you said here, the complaints get targeted at the wrong thing. "Why is my computer so slow? Did I get a virus?". No, it's just that Google just deployed even more bloated iteration of their GMail UI, CNN just added 20 more tracking scripts, and YouTube is now eating half of your RAM for no good reason.

I get through this dance with many of my non-technical family members and acquaintances. I can extend the life of their machines only so much with ad-blockers and cleaning out adware. Ultimately, they'll buy a new, faster machine, just to return to the status quo. And maybe I'll inherit one of their "slow" laptops and pull out 2+ more years of professional, productive use from it.

wott2• 8 years ago

Indirectly yes, they will ask why their computer is slow. Then they'll buy a new one and accept the salespitch for fiber gbps link.

This evening there was that broadcast on our national radio about "white zones", I don't know if you listened to it.

The 3 guests were directors in major telecommunication organisations and administrations of the country. They discussed how high-speed Internet should be available to everyone everywhere, and they declared that there should be fibre-to-home everywhere in the country.

But in 30 or 40 minutes of broadcast I think that they did not ask themselves once: why should everyone have access to optical fibre? does everyone need it? what for? can we define what real problems and needs are? can we define a set of stuff that really matter? why do we even need a high-speed access to read and fill administrative paperwork (without paper)? what can be done to achieve the same functions with low- or medium-speed Internet for everyone, by not wasting ressources?

I mean, it is crazy to be about to pour billions in something because... just because. Without a deep analysis of what is wanted and how to solve it. They have decided on a solution, but they have not defined the problem. They pretend to solve the case of a few people who are supposedly in trouble because they cannot fill important forms, but the real use will be that Jean-Pierre-Kevin and Rayanne will watch the same American blockbuster, each one on his own tablet or smartphone, but Rayanne will start watching it 10 minutes later, killing the global bandwidth because "eh! it's free".

At my place, the Internet speed was upgraded (I don't think anyone asked for it?), as a result people started using TV-over-xDSL, VOD and streaming like pigs, and now in the evenings the speed is worse than it used to be before the upgrade...

One must question the usage that is done with the infrastructure before spending billions building it, because the general consequence is a never ending abuse of the available infrastructure, whichever capacity it has.

(For Agu: <https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/le-telephone-sonne/le-t...)

theyinwhy2• 8 years ago

Every person I know is using an ad blocker so I guess they do care. And yes, publishers care as well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/05/27...

soared6• 8 years ago

True - Pubs care because they lose revenue, user use adblock to block ads. I don't know anyone who uses an adblocker to improve load speeds.

j2kun• 8 years ago

They don't discuss it because they just give up if it takes too long.

NKCSS• 8 years ago

The reason this website currently crumbles under the load is probably because the content is stored in a database, re-queried for every request, even though the content wil hardly ever change. Might be something else to look at ;)

nickheer4• 8 years ago

It's cached and, I promise, hasn't crumbled under heavy load for years. I don't know what's going on but I've asked for more resources. It does make me sad and embarrassed, though, so that's something.

pasta• 8 years ago

What I think is difficult is that most people think a website should be an experience.

The client wants this, the designer wants this, the marketeer wants this and even most users want this.

So that's how huge headers with high res photo's are born.

After that the site must be online asap and the developer doesn't have or take the time to load images responsive.

Combine this with a framework that takes 200ms to init and we are where we are now.

(And then ofcourse there is the marketeer telling you to include a script from x,y and z.)

With the right tools you can build a fast web, but I think most developers are not experienced, lazy or just don't care. (You don't need to include 0.5MB of FontAwesome when you only use 2 icons...)

And yeah: AMP is a joke.

SilasX4• 8 years ago

Which designer wants an unmovable header that takes 1/3rd of the screen and makes me feel like I'm looking at it through blinds, as I typically see on mobile?

eterm3• 8 years ago

framework that takes 200ms to init

Which framework(s) take 200ms to init?

lightswitch05• 8 years ago

AMP is terrible. I flat out block it in my hosts file and haven't missed it yet. Its pretty much just used for advertising anyway. Or for 'news' articles that are thinly disguised ads

TeMPOraL20• 8 years ago

What I think is difficult is that most people think a website should be an experience.

People on the delivering end. Not the users. The users just want to get the content they came in for, and to continue with their lives. This "website is experience" is a combination of vanity and trying to monetize users better by playing on their emotions.

eadmund3• 8 years ago

I wish that were true, but is it really? I think of Idiocracy, and how prophetic it was. I fear that most users do want 'Ow, My Balls' and brightly-coloured, moving objects to distract them from the ennui of life.

GuiA2• 8 years ago

You know how building wider roads doesn’t improve commute times, as it simply encourages people to drive more? It’s that, but with bytes and bandwidth instead of cars and lanes.

That's the core insight. Higher availability of resources leads people to consume more of said resources - in tech, typically for more and more abstraction layers to deal with hardware of ever growing complexity to make the lives of developers easier, but at the cost of stagnation or regression for some metrics. See also: "Why Modern Computers Struggle to Match the Input Latency of an Apple IIe"

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computer...

GuiA2• 8 years ago

(Can't edit anymore, but finally found the relevant Wikipedia link for the phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

ukulele• 8 years ago

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 is costly in large organizations.

Maybe other people making these decisions aren't idiots, and maybe, just maybe, they're even thornier and tech-savvier than you.

0xbadcafebee• 8 years ago

They're not idiots, they just don't give a crap about waste until it affects their bottom line. (Most humans seem to operate on this principle)

A lot of the business-related bullshit is a response to advertising and sales. But a lot is also lazy tech people slapping pieces together until it does a thing, and they don't care that it loads 100x more data than it needs to, because again, doesn't affect their bottom line.

Traffic costs must be pretty low, or nobody's watching that line on the AWS budget, or the CDN is eating the cost.

techbio2• 8 years ago

In a world where video over IP exists, market rate traffic expenses have got to be among the least of the concerns of print journalism.

nrhk2• 8 years ago

Why would they care, they have to do the work of 5 in the time of one because there's now off the shelf solutions for everything. Too bad if those solutions often come bloated and incorrectly configured, maybe they should hire more engineers. Some business prioritize loading speeds but big ones with brand reputation won't care, they have little to lose.

SilasX4• 8 years ago

I don't think you're wrong, but you may be overestimating how quickly they converge on an optimal balance, and what fraction of the bloat is necessary for business purposes. I frequently see sites that slow down my browser and mobile sites that become near unusable, and I doubt that is all necessary for making it pretty and having the right analytics. I've also frequently reviewed the work of front-end devs who just didn't see the easy optimizations they could make.

The bloat persists until there's a clear relationship between some unit of bloat and some concrete loss, but that might not be easy to see, because you don't see the people who long since gave up on your site.

Edit: One illustrative example is disability access accommodations. A lot of them are a net loss to the business, but some of them were obvious improvements no one had thought to do: "Oh, crap, it really does help to have a lip on the curb so you can roll stuff up!"

tannhaeuser2• 8 years ago

Sounds like you work in the publishing business (and also that GP has tripped you up somehow). Care to elaborate what the rationale for publishers to bloat their web sites could possibly be? Because I know I've come to use news aggregators like HN as portal sites (plus RSS) rather than go to news sites directly for many years now, precisely because I want to know beforehand if a particular article is even worth visiting, rather than receive a crapton of script for nothing valuable in exchange.

isleyaardvark• 8 years ago

I'm sure plenty of sites improve their bottom line by implementing dark UX patterns as well, it doesn't make it any less bullshit.

isoprophlex• 8 years ago

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 up don't continue to use the app. We could have learned that from server side logs without invading user privacy.

Another story: four employees of a large corporate running target marketing based on behaviour of customers logged in to their website.

Added revenue versus control: 60.000 yearly. Sub-0.1% conversation rates. The corp had been running these campaigns for at least five years.

My personal stories. Anecdata, I know.

There is SO MUCH BULLSHIT.

Edit: to clarify the first example, it's not a movie using the front facing camera, 'just' a screen grab

dgudkov2• 8 years ago

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 toast.

XCSme• 8 years ago

How do you know if the client has an error and the content was not loaded/displayed as expected? How do you know if placing the content on the right side or the left side increases conversion rate by 10% if you don't do A/B testing? There are huge business advantages when you use analytics. You don't care about creepily "tracking" a specific person, you just care about getting better conversion rates and happier users.

blub5• 8 years ago

There are many logical reasons why various websites are so bloated. Certainly the market realities and web development culture play a role.

That doesn't change the fact that the end result is bullshit, though. The tragedy of the commons is still a tragedy.

I don't have a solution for commercial news organisations. If they can't completely subsidise their web presence through other means, it's pretty much guaranteed that the advertising pressures will turn it into crap.

wuliwong5• 8 years ago

I don't understand how you are relating this to the tragedy of the commons other than saying that because something has a reason it doesn't preclude it from being something.

phyzome• 8 years ago

It's still bullshit, because it doesn't help the visitor, and it only helps the company to the extent that they're in a Red Queen's Race—if no one else did it, they wouldn't have to either.

dictum• 8 years ago

I know I'm an idealist too, and my comment will be a display of hypocrisy: it seems that one of the rules for using the Internet is that you should completely forget about the is-ought problem.

People will dole out all kinds of advice about technology, business, politics, society, relationships etc. by way of discussing something that only partially resembles reality (and assuming everyone or most people perceive things in the same way as themselves)

(I'm guilty of that too.)

bumholio2• 8 years ago

By the same token, maybe the automobile and oil industry really care a lot about the environment, but the only way to produce a safe, affordable and performing car is their tech savvy way refined for a century.

Or maybe they just don't give a shit, and the current status quo allows them to make money without caring about the consequences, until we as an informed community demand a better way.

Sniffnoy• 8 years ago

The fact that people want bullshit or that bullshit sells does not change the fact that it is bullshit.

wuliwong5• 8 years ago

I'm sure I am more consciously aware of the bloat but I do think that subconsciously "non-techy" people still dislike it.

I feel like this is similar to the apple vs microsoft/IBM debates. I'm not even sure what the popular take on it is these days but I do believe that to some extent a pleasing user experience was/is championed by Apple (in a specific aesthetic sense). And, if apple never existed we would have less tech products with that user experience philosophy embedded in them. I believe that illusive "pleasing" user experience that apple seemed to try to build in its products is similar to the idea of not having as much bloat on websites.

There is business value of consuming every single morsel of user tracking data possible but that tracking also has some cost in terms of user experience. Just because companies have tended towards bloat doesn't mean that they are definitely right. Apple has made a great deal of money and I believe some of that is due to their style of user experience.

rhizome2• 8 years ago

"[B]usiness was improved" is doing a lot of work in there.

ryandrake3• 8 years ago

The tons (and growing) of normal everyday users using ad blockers and other annoyance-reducing web plugins is evidence against this.

Also, we are not talking about the expense of “micro-optimization.” We are talking about not deliberately spending the time to add all this BS into the software. I guarantee it costs less to publish a text/plain document than a HTML/CS/JavaScript trash fire.

Zimahl• 8 years ago

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.

All i can say is that I work at a small-ish multi-million dollar business that got bought by a very large multi-billion dollar business. Our site has become very, very bloated due to everything that our parent corp wants in the name of 'making things better'. I'm not saying we are stagnant, but those changes really haven't increased our bottom line in any significant way. We now spend more time and dev resources supporting a site with much more 'bullshit'. Real business decisions, ones that benefited the customer, are where real increases in value were seen.

This of course is anecdotal, but I've never really heard the opposite.

arkh2• 8 years ago

Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people.

You sure won't see those in your analytics dashboard.

GW150914• 8 years ago

You just used “maybe” eight times to make an argument without having to support it in the slightest. Maybe you’re right, or maybe you’re just bristling at an argument made well and strongly supported without a leg to stand on. Maybe if you bothered to support your claims, or even make them real claims instead of “maybes” it would be easier to take your non-arguments seriously.

Of course it would also be easier to take you seriously if ad blockers and script managers and cookie sweepers weren’t so incredibly popular, along with VPNs. Every site begging people for money or to stop using an ad-blocker is a nail in your “point’s” coffin.

swsieber• 8 years ago

Or maybe it's really easy to have all the individual decisions make sense, but still arrive at a really insensible complete decision. Like a local maxima.

It's easy to be smart, make smart decisions and end up somewhere dumb.

eadmund3• 8 years ago

You make a good point: the people who have ruined the Web are doing it because it makes them a profit. That's the whole point of ethics & morality, though: refraining from what benefits us immediately because it's wrong. And just as it's wrong to kill the old lady next door to steal her house, it's wrong to turn a product-listing site into a JavaScript-laden monstrosity so terrible my phone becomes painfully hot to the touch.

vertexFarm• 8 years ago

I don't know, as much as I respect you looking out for the "engineer as savior" bias and the fact that average users may have a distinctly different viewpoint than we do, in this case it seems somewhat disingenuous.

People have spoken time and again about needless auto-playing video clips. About weird, busted scroll hijacks and massive header images. About newsletter beggars which take up the whole screen on every. single. site. About ubiquitous "got it!" cookie disclaimers. About pages that load mountains of extraneous crap while you're trying to read, and reflows the text halfway through the second paragraph, suspiciously at the exact moment you try to tap a link which makes you click an ad instead, which is of course bloated with poison dogshit and offal and immediately crashes the tab. About how every single major site bullies you into downloading an app instead of putting effort into making their mobile site run properly. Instead the mobile site is intentionally crippled to incentivize the adtech-infected app even more, and even the request desktop mode is broken. And of course the mobile app is only a thinly-veiled plot to scrape your phone's guts out like a dead fish and gain every permission possible. If it can run in a browser, I think it should run in a browser. I'm highly suspicious of any app that is really just a website in a tarted-up trojan horse.

Adblockers are perpetually on the rise, as the article says, and other content blockers and filters are also in play now. I have to use outline.com to read most news articles, which is an amazing resource. But I think this popular opinion is warranted. The internet is bloated with malicious bullshit. Everyone got in an arms race with each other and had to do it, despite nobody actually wanting it.

I don't think the devs and designers who made this stuff so ubiquitous are evil, nor are they stupid. They were just caught in a catch-22 as web trends do their fickle thing. They are regular people earnestly doing their best, just like everyone else. Doomed to create camel after camel via feedback from ignorant clients, misread focus groups, neurotic middle management, et cetera. People rarely get to decide or unilaterally invent any of these large-scale trends, they just happen as a herd phenomenon I think. And everyone has to jump on board to remain viable, or at least that's the illusion at the time.

pauljonas• 8 years ago

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.

KaiserPro• 8 years ago

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.

furicane• 8 years ago

Maybe other people making these decisions aren't idiots

Nice joke, I liked it! :)

duxup2• 8 years ago

Things are different now.

When I was on a modem... pictures, almost any, were bullshit as far as being big and annoying to download. A lot of the time I hated them.

Nobody thinks about pictures that way anymore. I suspect that goes for a lot of the bullshit listed in that article.

I'm no fan of tracking or auto play videos, but web applications are a thing now and the people visiting sites, building them, and paying for them want more than just a page... they want a whole application. All three of those (viewer, builder, dude who pays / host) aren't on the same page, but they also are largely happy to go down the road of bigger pages.

I'm all for efficiency and kicking some stuff to the curb, but as for size, it is not on the mind of most people.

I'd be all for a class of retro / minimal sites or something, but it is clear for a lot of things web apps is where we're going.

megaman22• 8 years ago

Pictures are still a huge pain in the ass on mobile connections. Try looking at Facebook or Instagram or Twitter on a flaky 2G connection. Although you don't get to see them stream in line by line like you used to in the good old days - they just take forever to download a muddy blurred version of the actual image first as a placeholder.

duxup2• 8 years ago

I hear ya.

Even better when you see what seems like a high rez picture that is sized small and you click to see it better ... oh crap it is starting over downloading again ... and I'm 99% sure the pic was already there before. (granted it may not have been high res but damn it it was close enough)

superkuh2• 8 years ago

The problem with pictures and modern websites is that they aren't there. Instead the pictures are only potential pictures which will only be loaded if you load the JS loaders that load the loaders that load the pictures (and all the tracking stuff).

With JS disabled you have no pictures or a super low resolution placeholder at best. Or a blank page showing nothing at worst (ie, nasa.gov).

Sir_Cmpwn2• 8 years ago

I think I heard this on Hacker News, but I don't recall who from. Whenever I see a popup begging me to sign up for a spam list, I put in postmaster@that-domain.com now.

dredmorbius6• 8 years ago

ceo@$DOMAIN is my preference. Or down the c-stack.

user59944615• 8 years ago

What's the postmaster supposed to be? Is it set in practice?

Sir_Cmpwn2• 8 years ago

It's meant to be the operator of the mail server, and is generally used for contacting the operator about problems with their mail setup. It's required to be available per RFC822.

https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc822/

How much that works out in practice is inconsistent. Most sysadmins will set it up in my experience, but it's not out of the question that it wouldn't exist. Some domains will just set up a catchall and it'll be directed to someone anyway. It varies.

realusername• 8 years ago

I do that for spam newsletters which added me without my consent. Most of them you can edit your email, and I edit it to contact@[their domain] or postmaster@[their domain]

Alex39172• 8 years ago

Yes, we should definitely go back to the days where there was only one stylesheet per page and the web wasn't accessible to those with visual impairments. Being blind is clearly just a lifestyle choice, and we shouldn't be catering to the blind agenda. /s

In all seriousness, most of the problem with bloat is on the mobile side. But in another ~1.25 years iPhones will have enough advanced LTE functionality that they will be basically the same speed as desktop computers. To whatever extent this is a real problem, it's not going to be nearly as big of an issue after another two or three years.

pdonis2• 8 years ago

we should definitely go back to the days where there was only one stylesheet per page and the web wasn't accessible to those with visual impairments. Being blind is clearly just a lifestyle choice, and we shouldn't be catering to the blind agenda.

How does bogging down pages with ads and tracking scripts and other bloat help the visually impaired? If anything, it should make things even worse for them than for sighted users, since it's easier (not easy, but easier) to navigate by eye to the part of the page you actually want to read than it is to skip over all the cruft using an accessibility add-on.

wuliwong5• 8 years ago

What do you mean by "bloat is on the mobile side"?.

Alex39172• 8 years ago

The problem with bloat. That is, web pages are just much slower to download and render on mobile than on desktop. E.g. a page that takes less than a second to load on desktop can easily take ten seconds to load on mobile. But two or three years from now, that same page will load in less than a second also.

amiga-workbench4• 8 years ago

I cant imagine how poor the web is for blind users nowadays with all the hyperactive javascript fucking with the DOM constantly, I really feel sorry for the poor gits who have to write screen readers.

nawitus2• 8 years ago

Most websites are not optimized well because optimization costs money and software engineers are expensive. There probably is not a market failure here.

pdonis2• 8 years ago

Most web sites send a lot of data that is not for me, the user; it's for the website, to serve ads or track me or do other things that I either don't care about or would much rather they didn't do. The website had to make a conscious choice to include all that stuff; it's not as though it was already there and would have to be optimized out.

In other words, the problem is the most websites are optimized, but not for their users.

nawitus2• 8 years ago

Agree, some bloat is due to ads and trackers, some are other things (like lack of optimization).

eterm3• 8 years ago

I've been thinking about building either a local proxy or firefox addon that puts everything into "first-party only" mode unless whitelisted.

It would probably break the web (at least the genuine parts) less than disabling javascript wholesale which is just too awkward, but it would vastly cut down on the "bullshit" as this article calls it.

It would need some care, for example it would probably have to work from root domains rather than subdomains for matching origin to prevent too much breakage but the improvement in download times would be astronomical, it's almost always the case that "bloat" is third-party bloat.

Obviously it would need to support a whitelist too so payment processors for example could continue to work, but in general the blacklist approach of ad-blockers just isn't working for me.

I think some kind of "auto-whitelist" so I'd need to actively request a domain before requests could be made to them would be the sweet spot for user experience but that itself would require substantial browser integration which I don't think could work through a plugin.

Perhaps a proxy approach would be the best from a UX perspective then. It could inspect headers to figure out if they're primary requests (using similar heuristics to CORS). Primary requests would (or could) be added to an auto-whitelist for future requests.

StavrosK• 8 years ago

Nah, this breaks too many CDNs and most pages stop working, just as if you had disabled JS.

slig• 8 years ago

uMatrix / uBlock seems to do what you want.

eterm3• 8 years ago

uMatrix looks like the kind of tool I was thinking of, thanks. I just wish I didn't have to give an addon permission to:

Access your data for all websites

Clear recent browsing history, cookies, and related data

Read and modify privacy settings

Access browser tabs

Access browser activity during navigation

But that's just the very broken permissions model that addons currently have so thank you.

btrettel• 8 years ago

RequestPolicy is another addon which does this, but it doesn't work on the latest Firefox.

cocoa19• 8 years ago

Another point for the bullshit web: The GDPR cookie consent notification. I really hate clicking on those notifications to make them go away.

Designers, can you please just add a non-obtrusive link, instead of a pop up that covers half my browser screen?

degenerate• 8 years ago

"This site uses cookies." is the new "Hot singles in your area!"

user59944615• 8 years ago

On the bright side, these popups are safe for work and have no attached images.

snarf21• 8 years ago

Not a design problem, ".... only that you conspicuously provide the option for obtaining informed consent ...."

The intention is that it must be obtrusive. The company has a choice between annoying you and mitigating risk.

Rjevski2• 8 years ago

Or just you know, not do anything that would require consent in the first place. If you have to ask for consent you’re already doing some of the bullshit outlined in the above article.

vitaflo• 8 years ago

Sure, but first let me have you talk to my PM who got this request for an obtrusive popup from our lawyers.

Designers don't want stupid popups all over the screen. Designers don't want half the bullshit that's put into sites these days. Our hands are tied. It's rarely our decision.

sincerely• 8 years ago

Or maybe 90% of websites that currently give you cookies have no good reason to do so and shouldn't?

artursapek• 8 years ago

That's more of a "bullshit politics" problem than a web design problem.

scarygliders• 8 years ago

People really hate autoplaying video

Yes, this a billion-fold!

Every single newspaper site I peruse uses autoplaying video.

The experience goes like this:

Load up the front page of newspaper site. Select an article of interest and click on its link. Article loads. A video player pops into existence on the lower right hand corner of the page, and the video starts playing.

Most annoying. However it gets more egregious...

The video player floats when you scroll down the page, until you reach the part of the page where it usually resides - and warps over into its little area - until you scroll past - whereupon it pops back up on the lower right hand side of your browser again.

Aaaaaargh!

Just as egregious : after viewing a video you might even have been interested inviewing, another video is automatically loaded onto that same player, 99.9% of the time on some completely unrelated subject.

Y'know, someone, somewhere, woke up one morning and thought "Great idea! Let's do <what is described above>!" - why can't the message that "People really hate autoplaying video" get back to whoever makes the decisions on user experiences, so that they just quit doing the above bullshit?

amelius• 8 years ago

The video is not actually the problem (for me). It's the audio.

Why can't my browser (Chrome) still not give me appropriate control over audio?

StyloBill• 8 years ago

It should be better in the near future:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/3/17251104/google-chrome-66-...

foepys2• 8 years ago

Stop visiting the sites then. There is nothing else you can do. Except maybe write them an email they'll ignore because their metrics (more like a "business analyst") tell them to autoplay videos.

ryandrake3• 8 years ago

Since this is posted to a site focused on developers, I’m surprised you didn’t mention the third option: Developers, stop adding all this crap to the software you’re writing and excusing it with “I’m just doin what I’m told!”

user59944615• 8 years ago

If it can help you, think of the video as the content. It really is the only content that matters on that page.

Yes, the site only exists to deliver that video, not any news. That video earns revenues, news do not.

maze-le• 8 years ago

Yeah, thats a great one, especially if you are in a big office and forget to plug in your headphones.

There is a simple trick though:

about:config >> Search for "autoplay" (media.autoplay.enabled) >> set it to "false".

Some players might refuse to play media outright though.

marataziat• 8 years ago

Is it a degradation of the web? Or it's just revolution of our hardware and internet speed?

makecheck3• 8 years ago

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 none of the content but you end up paying for it through your data plan.

We desperately need absolute maximums enforceable in the browser, reversing the firehose. I want to opt your site in to more data use, after I trust your site. And I expect sites to work within my limit or not receive visits.

amiga-workbench4• 8 years ago

Browsers should start offering the option to deny all cross origin resources too.

jazoom2• 8 years ago

It would be easy to make an extension to do that but I suspect most websites would no longer work correctly. Many websites have their own API server on a different domain, many host images on another domain, most use a CDN of some kind which hosts CSS, JS and sometimes HTML on another domain, etc.

JetSpiegel3• 8 years ago

uMatrix works on all browsers that matter.

jancsika2• 8 years ago

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 terms you agreed to when you signed up for a data-capped plan in the first place?

Edit: remove unnecessary word, clarification

fwip2• 8 years ago

Data caps are like your city bus. You can buy a bulk number of rides per month at a discount, and everything over that is billed at a regular rate.

The bus doesn't magically add more seats when you make extra trips on it, but it still costs more to take the bus three times a day than twice a week.

Even though the marginal cost of your body on the bus is minimal, having the fee serves to reduce crowding (demand at that price point) as well as fund the infrastructure. Data caps are the same.

Now, you can argue that data caps are surrounded by deliberately misleading marketing and that overage charges are unnecessarily steep. But you seem fundamentally opposed to the concept of data caps.

dTal• 8 years ago

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.

thinkingemote2• 8 years ago

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

moviuro4• 8 years ago

Same here, but is performance of the server OK? Because I've had bad performance issues with ~1k lines in hosts(5).

I've thus written a script that I run daily for my local unbound(8) daemon -or bind: https://gitlab.com/moviuro/moviuro.bin/blob/master/lie-to-me

RileyJames• 8 years ago

I use the “clean reader mode” (in safari, the small three stripe button next to the https lock in the address bar) very often to remove the clutter.

But this still means I downloaded all the unnecessary crap. Which is primarily annoying because of the delay in loading (crappy reception is the norm outside of Canadian cities).

Where as hacker news loads nearly instantly.

Is there a good alternative browser for iOS that avoids downloading JS, video, bloat?

nabla9• 8 years ago

Here is non-bullshit cnn: http://lite.cnn.io/en

CIPHERSTONE• 8 years ago

This is one of the reasons I like Jekyll. No PHP, no bullshit. It's fast, pre compiled pages. You can use web fonts if you like, or keep it all local. Speed usually takes a hit with websites when people try to monetize or add fancy features..

narrowtux• 8 years ago

You can still add all that bullshit with Jekyll. Having sites dynamically generated has nothing to do with bandwidth waste.

htor• 8 years ago

the web was born, and everyone was happy for this new thing. then advertisement came along and poisoned that too, just like tv, just like radio. we just can't have nice things because someone somewhere wants to squeeze all the pennies out of your pockets in whatever medium you use.

obligatory links for website obesity and bullshit web:

http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

agumonkey7• 8 years ago

I've read others comment on the lack of empathy for publishers. 10$ that the author doesn't blame them.

That said, this is a weird situation, to which I became allergic. To the point I started r/vanillahtml to stack websites that gave me that feeling of fat-free moment.

One thing you should do, is install dillo, and enjoy the web. It's usually faster than elinks, chrome whatever. Sure you'll get horrendous css rendering, no javascript. Still, it's worth seeing in person how instant a click / request / render can be. Also 10 tabs in dillo is probably 2MB.

# tech momentum

There were logical reasons to what we're in today. I was in there too at first. I wanted hyper dynamic webpages, more capable css, more live scriptability. But along the way I started to feel the unintended consequences. long loading, idiotic user interactions, regression in basic ergonomics, huge resource consumption, and worst of all, the twist it put on webpage producers. Open a 2000 webpage you'll see 20% chrome, 80% content. Now on average it's the opposite, not really 80/20, more like 50/20 with a bonus 30% popups (gdpr, cookies, newsletters, ads). Tech didn't provide value, it's root for pollution.

# societal re-rooting

old web was a side game, people got into it for the thrill of it, it gave a lot of interesting subtle and dense content. Now it's all business trying to live in the web era, it's a competition thing, with all that it entails. The web today looks like main street. Neon signs, noise, .. ugh.

also with real-time social platforms you see how most websites are low value, and reactive. It's changed a bit, people noticed that there was a need for less shallow, but it seems rare. Although to be honest I stopped monitoring if there was more of them today.

I agree with people comparing a website today with other kinds of texts. I feel super void when I read most of the web, and usually, a .txt file is a high guarantee that I'll find something more personal or technical than anything on the web. And it's near free. If the web was caring about communicating, we'd just have to extend SMS to 640kB with a streaming protocol in case you're reading wikipedia.

ps: oh and I love these https://lite.cnn.io/en (was trying to make a repository of them), so much love to those who push that kind of idea

carapace• 8 years ago

Dillo! https://www.dillo.org/

I mentally partition the web into Dillo-compatible and -incompatible subsets. :-)

agumonkey7• 8 years ago

I was about start an effort to list text-mostly websites.. I guess it's a little like your subsets.

I also tried to patch dillo to add an external bookmark backend (sqlite or else) and add lua scripting. Didn't go far sadly. Basically if I could greasemonkey and customize keybindings with a super tiny fast browser.. I'd be happy for life.

thecombjelly• 8 years ago

I do all my browsing with uMatrix with everything blocked by default but first party CSS. It really makes the internet a more enjoyable place to be. Pages load much, much faster and it's often easier to find and read the content. On mobile it saves a boatload in bandwidth costs. For example, loading a NYTimes article takes 90KB and DOMContentLoaded is in 69ms. Truly much of the other stuff loaded is bullshit because a significant amount of the web is more usable without all the crap.

mpax• 8 years ago

It’s not just the web, software in general is getting increasingly bloated.

Not in features, but in more and more layers of abstractions.

mxuribe2• 8 years ago

This is so monstrously correct! Kudos!

titzer• 8 years ago

The Web is the quintessential human artifact. This is what happens when large groups of people crap and eat from the same pile, the fast, the slow, the brilliant and the stupid, the refined, mundane, bloodthirsty and curious, the intricate and obscure.

I think of the web in layers. Not discrete, divisible layers, but more like the layers of any ancient city that's seen habitation for centuries. At the lowest level is the oldest stuff: mud huts, stone tools, open fireplaces, graves even. This is like the earliest layers of the web: the webrings, the no-css, no-script HTML bulleted lists, tables of blue links. Even garish black backgrounds. That old web was full of great things; so many enthusiastics and fanatics! So much information and content, written by real people. Short stories, poems, hackers, phreakers, crackers, IRC, that whole great era. That old stone age is mostly buried now, preserved here and there in museum quality, crumbling here and there, broken links, missing images. A mute reminder, hard to find even, of what it was like back then. BACK THEN, before the next layer of the web evolved on top. BACK THEN people on the internet were mostly curious but not nosy or malicious. BACK THEN people put effort into their sites, had to pay money to host their domains, didn't need CDNs and VMs and Cloud Computing.

But a layer evolved on top of that old web. It came with CSS in my estimation. Pages started getting fancy, using new fonts. Ads started popping up. Ads always started popping up. Search engines popped up. Then people started making money. Little trickles at first, then a gush, then a torrent. Online businesses, the FIRST BUBBLE, and everyone was rushing to pets.com and eBay and online pharmacies...you know, companies selling actual stuff. Amazon. Online publishing, news sites.

That bubble blew up. It grew too fast, people went into far too much debt to puff up their businesses. But quietly chugging along, always increasing, the little banners and annoying popups gave way to a more insidious form of advertising...the watching eye behind it all. The internet started watching us. First it was search history, then cookies and then fingerprinting, then whole underground economies of trackers. And all the while the SEO battles and trollers came along, so fast paced...

And something...else...grew on top of the web. You can see it now, maybe just the tip, when you go to one of the news sites that the OP talked about. The massive, heavy sites. Those are just the most polished of this massive avalanche of click-baity slide shows and fake news and crap that is heavy, laden with strewn together junk parts and oriented to only one purpose: making money, by hook or crook.

Now you can't hardly see through this layer anymore. It's like a fog. Go to any search engine and search for anything! What do you get? Aggregated, evolved--I won't say optimized--evolved content that is designed to keep you away from the older layers. I say evolved because that is exactly the right metaphor--the crap that survived by natural selection and crowded out the other, more carefully crafted, humble and matter-of-fact content. This new crap evolved to get straight to the top of the search ranking and grab those clicks. It doesn't matter what the original content was. The more commercial it is, the crappier it is for real content, and the more driven it is towards getting you to click through and BAM make a sale. For god sakes, try to find some neutral information about insurance. Try to find that one guy's website that as part of a trip report to the southwest to go hiking with his kids, talks about how the rental agency wouldn't reimburse him for a flat tire. Or some basic, old-web archaeology like that. You cannot find that stuff anymore. It's hidden by a huge layer of commercial bullshit that is designed to lure you in, sell you crap, get you to sign up for newsletters, take surveys, or at the very least track your ass at the slightest sign you might be interesting. And don't think for a minute that it's all an accident, or some unforeseen consequence or poor search ranking function. The whole system is set up to, and rewarded by, and fed by, their ability to serve themselves, not you. Make no mistake. If the algorithm makes more money, it's gonna get shipped. People might wring their hands about it, but the slippery slope is still slippery, and no one can hold the line forever. Least of all when that takes mental energy and forethought...something SO much better suited to ML algorithms and scale. Just scale up to the whole web.

We lost our way. The web isn't run by us anymore. It's run by them. And them...whoever they are...search engines, advertisers, publishers, people with political agendas, psychos, dictators, people with power. They don't even have control either. Look at the news sites and aggregators. They tell you want they want to tell you. You can't even set preferences anymore. It's all drive by AI. For fuck's sake nobody really knows what to tell the AI to do, except make money.

AI. AI to rank what's important. To tell us what we should look at, watch. Buy. Adjusting news to either make us mad or placate us. Creating and reinforcing a bubble that absolutely always benefits someone else besides ourselves. We keep giving it subgoals, but it'll just keep going around them to what we really want, making money, because that's all we ever reward it for!

The fat ass webpages is just a symptom. The disease is that everyone is shoveling shit into your face just to make a buck. Everyone is trying to automate their crap as fast as they can, throwing crap at the wall to see what will stick. And they just. don't. give. a shit.

giardini2• 8 years ago

Best post this month, possibly this year.

titzer says:"...You cannot find that stuff anymore. It's hidden by a huge layer of commercial bullshit that is designed to lure you in..."

So true. [And wouldn't it be nice if search engines had an option whereby one could first set a date and thereafter search results would display as they once did on that date?]

But again, great post! Kudos to you! Well said, sir!

mxuribe2• 8 years ago

Oh, wait a minute...what if we twist the existing non-net neutrality for our consumer purposes? What if we had easier mechanisms to slow down the more annoying aspects of websites we visit - such as those extraneous scripts on CNN, etc.? And, as we visit personal blogs that we value, we don't slow those down. (And, yes, if you're thinking to ask me about netflix, yes i would NOT slow that down. ;-) Anyway, if we had the "ease" with which to de-incentivize these web platforms, perhaps they'll be pushed to slim down their content delivery?

Now, before anyone replies with something like, "but you can implement ad blockers, etc."...yes, i know there are mechanisms...but i mean "easy" mechanisms...that is, something my grandma could implement with ease. i think this would serve to give true power to the consumer both on the net neutrality front as well as the content consumption front.

jjuhl• 8 years ago

One reason why I subscribe to https://lwn.net/ is that it is a fast no bullshit web site. Another is the great content.

kaitari• 8 years ago

This phenomenon is not limited to BS web. Back when virtualization was the new wave, everyone raved at the money/space/energy savings from running multiple virtual machines on a single server. It was great. Then what happened? Many folks went nuts, spinning up VMs for any and everything, and suddenly needed to spend more money on more physical servers to run more VMs, and an infinite loop.

Bloat from convenience.

machiavelli1024• 8 years ago

In other words: horror vacui

wuliwong5• 8 years ago

Lately I've been noticing this with Facebook. It is interesting that in its early stages, my perception of Facebook was that it was a very well built site. It seemed simple, clean, loaded fast, etc. It seemed particularly lean when compared to Myspace. Without really delving into the details of exactly what is happening today, I definitely perceive the web app as being slower. Obviously it is delivering a ton more images and video but nonetheless the experience seems slow. The ios app on the other hand still feels very performant to me. I think their handling of video is really impressive.

dredmorbius6• 8 years ago

I'd long griped about Google+ page size. Happened to poke around FB for a bit (couple of years back). Immensely worse.

Google's somewhat criticised redesign about 18 months ago actually hugely improved memory usage. Site's still on a declining tragectory....

dkoston3• 8 years ago

I disagree that the AMP cache is the main benefit of AMP. There are plenty of CDNs that give performance similar to, or better than the AMP cache.

The only benefit of AMP is that the pages are promoted higher in results.

Back to the main topic of the article, the same could be said for the desktop and the mobile phone. Developers and framework builders are constantly adding bloat as cpu/memory increase. Since most people aren't writing their own frameworks and many are importing large parts of their apps from npm/gems/etc, everyone gets hit with the bloat. It's a vicious cycle for sure.

It's a shame that so many open source authors add bloat into their packages in exchange for popularity. They want all the users so you get tons of code that's never used in 90% of projects.

The big example of the above is express. It's a terrible cycle as the vast majority of people learning JavaScript have hopped on the express bandwagon and are now creating APIs with mediocre performance by importing a massive webserver they often do not need.

Overall though, it seems to show that most people prefer convenience over accuracy and performance (passive aggressive stab at mongo?)

superkuh2• 8 years ago

The only benefit of AMP is that the pages are promoted higher in results.

Not just promoted in the results but actually pre-loaded in the background when you're using google search. It's double the monopoly fun.

dkoston3• 8 years ago

True. Hopefully anti-competitive stuff like this will be challenged in court so we don’t have to play the game.

jstewartmobile3• 8 years ago

One bright-side to the end of Moore's law is that--until some new computational breakthrough comes along--we are at a web bullshit plateau.

Just think of the stuff they could pull off with ten more years of speed-doublings...

stickfigure• 8 years ago

Try these sites without javascript. It's AMAZING.

The chrome extension I'm using ("Quick Javascript Switcher") disables JS on a domain-by-domain basis, so it doesn't break the whole web. Every news site I've tried is massively more usable with Javascript disabled - loads in a snap, scrolls without jerky motion, zero popups or autoplay videos.

Usually you get all the text and most of the images. Some news websites have javascript-driven photo collages, but it's just one buttonclick to enable JS for that session, and I can decide to do so after reading the text and judging the wait worthwhile.

I feel like I've stumbled on a secret life hack. Try it.

liquidwax2• 8 years ago

I can vouch for this. Although I've been doing this with regular chrome (disabled javascript by default) and I whitelist sites with the click of on icon in the location bar.

techbio2• 8 years ago

UX density is reduced by icons and images. Utility used to be thorough link quality (ie. the portal) but has been reduced to ranking on search endpoints to collect nickels.

Here's a very useful site that uses Javascript without going near megabytes: https://www.freeformatter.com/

mirimir• 8 years ago

I entirely agree with the author's points.

However, that CNN page[0] took just ~5 seconds to load. In fully readable form, with images. Through a three-VPN nested chain, with ~240 msec total latency. But then, I block ads, most scripts, and fonts.

0) https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/24/politics/michael-cohen-donald...

splittingTimes• 8 years ago

It's the _website obesity crisis_ in full swing

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445

hackeraccount• 8 years ago

the site would have been nicer with a few images. Also the text layout was tedious - different fonts should've been used to convey metadata about the information in it.

toss1• 8 years ago

>"... pretty much any CNN article page includes an autoplaying video, a tactic which has allowed them to brag about having the highest number of video starts in their category. ... People really hate autoplaying video."

The result is that, even though I used to watch CNN often, it has been years since I've intentionally opened one of their web pages, and when I accidentally do so, I almost frantically close it to shut off the damn, auto-play -- and that's even if I was interested in the video content.

I'll get it somewhere else, thx.

MrStonedOne• 8 years ago

I have a policy of disabling javascript on any article based website.

Its worked out well, most news sites load lightning fast, better viewing experience, no videos, the only downside is companies like the new york times that embed low res images then load full res in the background using javascript.

Here's a funny concept, if disabling javascript makes your website better, you failed.

quickthrower2• 8 years ago

Or just prefix the url with https://outline.com/

antuneza• 8 years ago

A good example of the Jevons Paradox

tabtab• 8 years ago

Humans are inefficient, illogical, and wasteful. "Dilbert" is not actually a comic strip, but a catalog. The only way to stop all this is to Kill All Humans. We await your confirmation__

- Bot #72504

BLKNSLVR2• 8 years ago

Whilst this is true, and it already references another analogy in 'bullshit' jobs, it's just another piece of the 'bullshit' magnetism of human nature.

Church, TV, Music, Movies, Conversation, Food, Meetings, Politics, Watching sport

The 'bullshit' to 'worthwhile' ratio is 95:1 at best.

I've just depressed myself.

Maybe it's a pattern that humans are programmed to follow subconsciously. Our brains cannot handle consuming / participating in anything less than 95% bullshit. Maybe it's the bullshit time that allows us to cope with the 5% of the 'real'?

Things such as the 'bullshit' web are just a differently-contexted manifestation of that pattern of behaviour.

icedchai• 8 years ago

That CNN article he mentions does take 30 seconds to finish loading... However, you can start reading the article in less than a second. Actual perceived load time is nearly instant.

For the actual end-user perspective, this article is mostly bullshit.

tombh• 8 years ago

This is in part why I'm developing https://html.brow.sh - a purely text-based web, rendered by a fast remote modern browser.

lsiebert• 8 years ago

It strikes me that, if people want web developers to load less stuff, there have to be ways to reduce redundancy. It might also make privacy easier.

For example, some sort of self hosted standard based framework for tracking common things like scrolling or ad clicks or page visits that supports multiple consumers, both internal to the site publishers for detailed analytics and logging and ad view tracking, and less granular access for external companies that can add value can get information from. Your user's data stays on your self hosted user data server, and analytics can make server to server requests for aggregate data with GraphQL or a standardized api at least, improving user privacy.

If you really needed additional functionality, there could be standardized add-on modules, or updates to the spec.

notatoad• 8 years ago

Oh yay, another article complaining about all the bullshit modern websites want to load, and then also complaining about the best solution so far.

Yes, it sucks that amp requires loading a chunk of js from Google. But you know what? It actually makes things better. It solves a real problem, better than anything else is solving any similar problem. Nobody else is successfully convincing publishers to slim down their pages.

If you have a better plan, let's hear it. But bitchy blog posts aren't going to convince your local paper to improve their page speed.

awinder• 8 years ago

Web developers often don’t have a choice whether to ship bullshit or not. Hell, engineering managers and directors often probably don’t have this choice.

The single greatest feature of AMP (which I dislike with great passion, don’t get me wrong) is that it forces broken org structures to make better engineering choices. There is no negotiation. There is no “marketing director is higher on the pecking order”. There is just design constraints placed from outside of the organization that must be followed.

JoshMnem• 8 years ago

The Web was becoming unbearable until I started browsing with all CSS and JS off by default (using umatrix and 50,000 lines in my hosts file). It's an amazing improvement. If I can't read something, I enable some CSS and change the defaults for that site. Firefox reader mode helps. I also disable all CSS animation with Stylus.

S_A_P• 8 years ago

Ive long been thinking that the way to "fix" journalism in the US(and possibly rest of the world) is to have apple music/spotify like channels that the major publishers broadcast through. It solves the problem of having 50 different 1 dollar per month subscriptions, and aggregates content in a way that I would never have trouble paying for if it were done correctly. This model is already in place for things like Satellite Radio, Cable TV, the aforementioned apple music spotify, netflix, etc.

Am I the person that needs to build this??!!

crasshopper• 8 years ago

browse in w3m. problem solved.

tylerjwilk00• 8 years ago

While we're on the topic of web performance regression can we please talk about all these damn loading spinners.

JS and ajax we're supposed to save us.

Now instead of one slow page load. I get one slow page with a loading spinner, a login component with a loading spinner, a carousel with a loading spinner, latest news component with loading spinner. Content divs shifting and bouncing every which way as content loads.

It looks like some spilled a bucket of ajax-load.gif all over the damn page!

I'd prefer a blank page and the sudden appearance of the entire page.

basicplus2• 8 years ago

Modern televisions and combined recorder-tuners are the same..

My old black & white and clolour valve television sets and VHS video recorder are up and running well before their modern equivalents!

giardini2• 8 years ago

Useful might be a browser that extracts most of the information content from web pages and discards most of the formatting information? The text-only browser Lynx comes to mind but I think its obsolete now and doesn't show graphics, which sometimes are useful/necessary.

cshenton• 8 years ago

Reading mode on safari does this.

nojvek• 8 years ago

Haha, I think the web is a lot like markets. Buyers will pay up to what they can afford, i.e the best price is the one that the buyer feels very uncomfortable but still pays because they want something and they can’t it anywhere else at a better price.

Sometimes this is abused (see US healthcare) but that’s the rule of markets. Demand and Supply.

I guess the internet is the same. The media companies will try to use every analytics and ad company under the hood to maximize every little ad click they can get. They will fill the pipes to the brim and implement every dark pattern as long as they make that extra revenue. (See taboola - the scum of clickbait advertising)

At the end of the day if you don’t like something. Don’t use it. I rarely visit cnn. I install adblockers and tracking blockers. We fight it with what we have.

It’s supply and demand laws. We as consumers install stuff to block annoying things, they as sellers will keep on annoying you as long as you keep on visiting them because a mild annoyance of ads and auto-play videos is how they keep the lights on.

The case of Google however is they are on a mission to have a monopoly of search on their browser and ads on their platforms. That’s how they make 90%-ish of their revenue. Google could say whatever the hell they want to say their mission is, their actions and financials clearly say what they value.

buchanae2• 8 years ago

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

TeMPOraL20• 8 years ago

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

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

buchanae2• 8 years ago

Yes! That's a good one.

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

jwhiz22• 8 years ago

I should go work for a company that cares about this stuff. Time to go back to adding Adobe Launch on a dozen sites.

ankurdhama• 8 years ago

Every web site (or app) wants to look "cool" and wants to differentiate themselves from others based on the look. This quest to look cool leads to all the animations and images etc which leads to the increase in download size. For the most part the reason for this quest to look cool is to grab user attention as much as possible so that they can do their actual business i.e ads.

dm33tri• 8 years ago

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.

tlrobinson• 8 years ago

Heh, if you look at the JS console while loading cnn.com you'll see the following:

     .d8888b.  888b    888 888b    888
    d88P  Y88b 8888b   888 8888b   888
    888    888 88888b  888 88888b  888    We are trying to make CNN.com faster.
    888        888Y88b 888 888Y88b 888    Think you can help?
    888        888 Y88b888 888 Y88b888
    888    888 888  Y88888 888  Y88888    Send your ideas to: bounty AT cnnlabs DOT com
    Y88b  d88P 888   Y8888 888   Y8888
     "Y8888P"  888    Y888 888    Y888

z3phyr2• 8 years ago

I am using a 4GB RAM HP Probook for the last 5 years (Student Artifact). You have to be very disciplined to use it though. I never open more than 10 tabs on the browser. While programming and testing, I generally close the browser. Use only lightweight WM. Avoid using JS based UI. My stack is vim/emacs (sorry) + a compiler (clang/rustc/sbcl) or perl/python + zsh/bash (userspace) + a terminal emulator + occasional firefox + wget/curl and weechat

I read pdfs with emacs. My computer's pretty fast wrt my peer's higher spec machine (16GB) with VS Code, Slack, Chrome and whatnot.. But he does play games better!

z3phyr2• 8 years ago

As an external observer, I must say we are going to fast in an unorganized fashion! Software is eating the world and swallowing more than it can chew.

Businesses have monetized the web in so much unsustainable way that we have to introspect to clear our shit. What would have gone wrong if the general public still got good high quality old print media while the otherwise tech savvy worked patiently to make a better web? What would have gone wrong if the web remained just a portal to share textual information, while the other people did what they had been doing traditionally?

TekMol• 8 years ago

These days, when I visit a website I have not visited before, it feels like entering a war zone. Trying to extract some information while the enemy tries to kill me.

Enabling hostname after hostname in umatrix until the content is revealed. Hoping not to trigger too much user hostile crap along the way.

pacifika• 8 years ago

For this to change websites will have to stop chasing growth

azernik• 8 years ago

I'm going to have to disagree on the hostility to AMP.

Specifically with this paragraph:

It seems ridiculous to argue that AMP pages aren’t actually faster than their plain HTML counterparts because it’s so easy to see these pages are actually very fast. And there’s a good reason for that. It isn’t that there’s some sort of special sauce that is being done with the AMP format, or some brilliant piece of programmatic rearchitecting. No, it’s just because AMP restricts the kinds of elements that can be used on a page and severely limits the scripts that can be used. That means that webpages can’t be littered with arbitrary and numerous tracking and advertiser scripts, and that, of course, leads to a dramatically faster page.
...[supporting evidence]
So: if you have a reasonably fast host and don’t litter your page with scripts, you, too, can have AMP-like results without creating a copy of your site dependent on Google and their slow crawl to gain control over the infrastructure of the web. But you can’t get into Google’s special promoted slots for AMP websites for reasons that are almost certainly driven by self-interest.

The point of AMP is exactly this restricted spec - it's so Google can statically verify that your site follows their performance guidelines. You can write a really fast website if you want, but unless you're willing to let Google make sure that you're actually doing so they're not going to take it on faith.

baud1472582• 8 years ago

But Google can measure a page weight and load time when it's indexing it and use it in its pagerank calculation, it doesn't need to take control of your page to do it.

moviuro4• 8 years ago

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 screenshot on photos.google.com - don't have access to imgur or similar)

dredmorbius6• 8 years ago

FYI, the Google Photos link requests a login.

moviuro4• 8 years ago

Wow, that's weird. It didn't when I posted it :(

shthed• 8 years ago

There are many chrome extensions that do the same thing

moviuro4• 8 years ago

Except that my "corporate strategy" doesn't allow installing extensions. So a built-in tool is excellent.

hutzlibu• 8 years ago

The main problem is and remains: money.

Professional newswebsites or alike don't work for free.

But the majority of people is not willing to pay.

So ads and tracking and more ads and more ads. As this is the default buisness for "free" services. You pay with your data and attention, nothing new.

I would like this to change to the way Wikipedia works for example. No ads. Voluntarily payment. No paywall, free for everyone, even though only some people pay.

But micropayment services are not good enough, nor widespread and the average mindset is not there either.

But it could go there slowly, once people realize the true cost of all those "free" sercices and that paywalls are not nice either.

And besides, even though I agree to the sentiment of the aeticle, the comparison of plain text to an styled article with pictures ... is not really valid. I like sometimes reading plain text, but I enjoy a well done website more. With nice fonts, styles and pictures fitting to the flow of information and not as a distraction. I just don't like advertisement in general, nor ads using my cpu to analyse me.

actionowl• 8 years ago

Webfonts need to die. I'm sick of loading a page, seeing the text for a moment, then it vanishes and I'm forced to wait, possibly for multiple seconds to see the text again in some pretty font the authors thought I cared about.

baud1472582• 8 years ago

I appreciate that the author is doing what he's preaching: his page is less than 10 KB, including ads and (self-hosted) analytics.

JulianMorrison• 8 years ago

This is why I need something like uMatrix to explicitly whitelist the text and leave the marketing wibble on the server.

iamgopal• 8 years ago

Appstore based browser.

codethief• 8 years ago

Very relevant: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

pure-awesome• 8 years ago

If we have the Dweb, does that make this the Bweb?

mark_l_watson• 8 years ago

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.

majani• 8 years ago

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.

StillBored4• 8 years ago

Its not just transferred content is literally minutes of CPU time on some webpages just to run the javascript. This isn't noticeable on a fast desktop, but try running some of these pages on atom class PCs or 5 year old phones (or for that matter put firefox on you phone and request the desktop site).

agumonkey7• 8 years ago

https://imgur.com/MRnd81J

anonu• 8 years ago

I know of a few sites that have a light version. CNN for example: http://lite.cnn.io/en

But I find that articles are so media heavy these days that removing videos or images detracts from the meaning

royroyroys• 8 years ago

http://www.textfiles.com This just reminded me of this site. The site is quite old now, but it used to be a great source of information.

The Bullshit Web

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