Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/media-websites-vs-facebook/

by cpeterso • 11 years ago

89 31 11 years ago

bostik• 11 years ago

The article was better than I expected from the title.

It's not about Facebook, and it's not exactly about online media either. It's about failed expectations with (particularly mobile) online media, and how conflicting needs far too often neglect the user experience.

Speed matters. Performance is crucial. Load times are atrocious. And above all: screen real estate on mobile is precious. A badly transferred advert that happens to sort of work on desktop, when the user has >20Mbps connection - it murders the UX on mobile. And as a result, makes the entire site unusable. As a result, users are moving to anything that makes the content load faster, and where the ads are not as intrusive.

The irony of it all? FB is better at serving media than the producers and publishers themselves.

UX >> UI.

finnyspade• 11 years ago

I agree with the overall sentiment expressed that web developers can and should do better as it comes to performance. There were a few inaccurate or misleading remarks in the article that I'd like to draw attention to:

1) Guess how those Instant Articles are formatted? HTML. Guess how those articles get to the app? HTTP.

This is misleading because it seems to equate pulling in content with loading an article. By loading these articles into the app (as opposed to launching a browser), Facebook gains the ability to do the following:

- Provide the basic styles from app-install time. Most of your css doesn't need to be downloaded.

- Skip app boot time. App's take a while to cold start, meaning I don't have to start safari before I start the web request.

- Prefetch. I don't know if they do or will do this, but facebook could reasonably prefetch articles and their resources before you click

2) Stop buying into the ‘native is better’ myth. (It’s just different.)

Another phrase for "different" is "better at different things". It turns out that the app model provides some amazing guarantees that the web can't match (and vice-versa):

- Preloaded styles and logic. Content changes, but presentation stays the same. Only download content. (no caching is not a valid solution, because exercising new parts of the code would require a download. Though some appmanifest magic may let you get pretty close)

- Cheap library inclusion. If an app is an extra MB or so it's no big deal most of the time. You can use that to load in libraries that vastly speed up developer work and can do "progressive enhancement" by supported new APIs on old OS versions. Libraries are way more costly on the web as the author points out.

- Consistent (with the OS) UX and much cheaper animations

- Lower memory footprint

These things do matter! The web is amazing, yes. No, it's not dying, but there is value in native apps and they're not equivalent. Smart engineers will make the choice based on their needs which is what both facebook and these news sources are doing.

paganel• 11 years ago

For what it's worth the Facebook app takes forever to load (like 3 minutes or more) on my 3-year old iPhone 4, while browsing for stuff on Safari stills works reasonably well, bar the odd website which throws a huge advert at you.

People would probably advise me to change my phone, to get a newer one, but why should we change our phones every 2 years? Why create more waste? Why spend money uselessly on stuff that should work for at least 5 years?

josephb• 11 years ago

Even on an iPhone 6 the Facebook app can feel sluggish and clunky. The mobile site in Safari is a good alternative and feels quicker.

supster• 11 years ago

100% agree, I felt like the author was a bit misleading in point #1

Animats2• 11 years ago

From the article: "The web definitely has a speed problem due to over-design and the junkyard of tools people feel they have to include on every single web page. However, I don’t agree that the web has an inherent slowness. The articles for the new Facebook feature will be sent over exactly the same connection as web pages. However, the web versions of the articles have an extra layer of cruft attached to them, and that’s what makes the web slow to load. The speed problem is not inherent to the web; it’s a consequence of what passes for modern web development. Remove the cruft and we can compete again."

I've been bitching about this ever since it became clear that CSS made web pages bulkier. (Yeah, it was supposed to make them shorter. Didn't happen.) We had much faster loading pages when people created HTML 3.2 with Dreamweaver and tables, and most of them looked about the same. Now we need HTTP2 so that all the "assets" can be loaded more effectively. There are even content management systems which generate bloated custom CSS for every page, with huge numbers of classed tags customized for each page. This eliminates any useful caching.

Some major sites have figured this out. The Wall Street Journal's home page has become shorter and simpler at the HTML level. Two years I looked at it, and some content management system was inserting the entire sign-up-for-a-subscription machinery on every page. They've fixed that. The Washington Post is inserting the same block of Javascript for each story. Somebody should tell those guys about functions.

I have a web service which strips all active content (Javascript, Flash, Active-X, Silverlight, etc.) from a page, parses it, and redisplays it. Most major news sites seem to work OK in that mode. Instagram is fine. (WhatsApp looks awful.) Much of the junk that slows page loading is providing little, if any, benefit to the user.

cousin_it• 11 years ago

Something like Readability?

scholia3• 11 years ago

I saved a Washington Post page -- a short interview -- and it came to 3054KB. I saved a NY Post page and it came to 2843K. For all I know, there could have been piles of background junk that weren't saved with the page.

It does seem a bit remarkable that these sites need to ship 3 megabytes of stuff to deliver 20K of text....

I think I need your web service ;-)

Animats2• 11 years ago

If you want to try it, try

  http://www.sitetruth.com/fcgi/viewer.fcgi?url=news.ycombinator.com

replacing the URL parameter with the desired web site. It's a tool we use to see how our crawler views a page. It reads the first 1MB from a URL, converts everything to UTF-8 based on the strict rules for charsets (no guessing), parses it with a HTML5 parser to create a parse tree, throws out the Javascript and Flash, makes all the links absolute, and emits a pretty-printed version.

Most sites have readable text after this, although some features may not work. The ones that don't do something like creating the page with document.write(), or one of those "parallax" formats. It's a reasonable test to see if the web designers went completely overboard. If you're getting a blank page, search engines probably aren't indexing that page very well.

webnrrd2k• 11 years ago

I've said the same thing a few times -- life on the web would be much easier in many ways if they used html tables, but renamed it to "Grid" or "Layout" or some such.

rjaco312• 11 years ago

What's the difference between using your reader and simply having Javascript/Flash/etc deactivated? (beside not leaking the whole browsing history to your website & increased lantency)

tempodox• 11 years ago

The gist is for me: The speed problem is not inherent to the web; it’s a consequence of what passes for modern web development. Remove the cruft and we can compete again.

My guess is, the cruft will not be removed, but will just be sped up with WebAssembly etc. Building a web site that's functional and fast stays an art form that's not accessible to everyone. Native apps are just a quick-&-dirty cop-out from that problem.

dspillett• 11 years ago

WebAssembly won't do anything for the latency delays of a myriad of support files (javascript, CSS, images) which is the key problem for small apps and non-applicatino pages, HTTP2's better handling of multiple files (or for HTTP(S) grouping everything into one minified block) won't help if they are coming from different 3rd parties, ...

That is an issue that needs to be addressed by people changing how they currently build some pages/apps. It is particularly bothersome when mobile and stuck on a slow high-latency connection.

Paul_S• 11 years ago

I feel like I'm living under a rock, sheltered from all this except when ever so often I click on a link on HN an get taken to some website from hell. Complaining about that world is like complaining about how pointless broadcast TV is. You can't fight it and there isn't anything there worth fighting for, you're not missing out on anything.

thenomad• 11 years ago

This article really highlights something that I'm constantly amazed by - just how SLOW major media organisations are prepared to allow their websites to be.

When I'm designing a landing page for anything significant (product, movie, whatever), I'm looking for sub-second load times - ideally below 500ms. Why? Because there are tons of studies showing that page load speed makes a huge difference to user experience, retention, CTR, the whole nine yards.

How come bigger media companies, whose expense accounts for team lunch are probable larger than my entire Web budget, fail to learn this?

I'm baffled.

chrisdbaldwin• 11 years ago

How come bigger media companies, whose expense accounts for team lunch are probable larger than my entire Web budget, fail to learn this?

Because they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want a fast website, but they'd rather have ads everywhere and track everything.

scholia3• 11 years ago

They want a fast website, but they'd rather have ads everywhere and track everything.

Aren't the ads chosen and served by third parties, and isn't almost all the tracking done by third parties?

Is the real problem that leading media sites have lost control of the speed of their web pages (or lost control of a significant chunk of it) to tracking and advertising companies such as Google?

I'm not a web developer, and I'm speculating from a position of ignorance, but I'd be interested to know the answer....

harryf• 11 years ago

Because their job is not software development, it's reporting the news and earning from advertising.

Sure they have developers working _for_ them but that doesn't make them a software development company. When you factor in all the factors related to running a high traffic site these days; different browser versions, web vs. mobile, scaling etc. etc. it's unrealistic to expect them to be able to stay on top of it.

Along comes Facebook and Apple News and that's the magic wand: those guys "get" software development so delegate the problem to them

Someone1234• 11 years ago

Gaining high speed for a small website is easier than keeping that speed as your site grows. There are numerous reasons for this e.g.:

- Giving non-technical people a CMS (where they'll upload unoptimised images).

- Feature creep.

- More complicated infrastructure (geo-distributed, load balanced infrastructure, etc). Tuning is definitely still possible but harder.

- Politics (e.g. trying to remove some pointless JS or CSS could take months and require several meetings).

- The absolute cost of doing anything grows.

Google and others have shown that large web-sites can keep things fast, but they've also shown it takes the entire organisation prioritising that for it to happen. I'm sure big media sites would benefit from being faster, in a measurable way, but the key is: Can you get other (non-technical) departments to agree to make real-world cuts to make that happen? Maybe.

matthewmacleod• 11 years ago

You are not kidding. The user experience of most media sites is appalling, mostly down to performance.

Here's a great example I saw recently when I hit the Daily Mash without Ghostery enabled: https://www.dropbox.com/s/seu0run7pn4tbc6/Screenshot%202015-... - in excess of fifty(!!) third-party scripts and trackers, rendering the browser unusable for multiple seconds. It's a frustrating, miserable experience.

rockdoe• 11 years ago

Mozilla reported an average pageload performance of 40% by just blocking the tracking scripts.

throwawayoldmed• 11 years ago

It's a result of two things: The company is big, and the company is legacy.

The fact that the company is big means that there are siloed areas where, for example, the analytics team doesn't talk to the content team. Or the local station management doesn't talk to the CMS developers. These disconnects are present all over such organizations. This means that any changes are likely to be both overdesigned (because everyone has to have their input) and very slow to implement (because everyone has to approve).

The fact that the company is legacy means that they simply view the web as another outlet for their content. They don't believe in optimizing for the web because they have many surfaces for their content, and it's historically more important for, say, the paper newspaper to be laid out correctly than the web version of the same article. These sorts of people don't change their views easily, and they still don't see the web as the primary outlet for the content (they see that as the paper newspaper, or the terrestrial radio broadcast, or the terrestrial TV broadcast). The web is always secondary at best. Overcoming these attitudes is quite difficult.

omouse• 11 years ago

Mozilla needs to have a separate web browser project that only focuses on cutting out the cruft of the top 100 websites plus top 50 news sites. Filter out the ads, filter out the JS that launches advertising modals, cache the content, in short do anything to make sure they load in under 2 seconds with 1 second or 500ms the goal.

When you control the client you can stop so many unnecessary requests and you can patch sites (GreaseMonkey and Stylish were/are the best extensions) when they arrive.

This is exactly why the web is built as it is; you don't have to take whatever crap is shoved at your browser, you are in control.

pc2g4d• 11 years ago

Except this probably violates everybody's Terms of Service....

jrochkind12• 11 years ago

Your problem is that if you put your developers ahead of your customers, you’ll end up with just the developers.

This implies it's just a matter of priorities. In fact, it's a matter of cost. The OP admits that what he advocates "isn't easy", technically. That means it's more expensive. More developer hours, more highly-skilled developers, or both.

It is a matter of priorities in the sense that an organization needs to understand what a good product looks like and be willing to spend the money to create a good product, trusting the investment will ultimately be repaid (as the OP argues but is hardly guaranteed). But it's not avoiding "putting developers over customers", in fact they need to be spending more on developers than they are now to get a good product, they need to 'elevate' their developers further, always remembering the ultimate goal is serving users of course.

woah• 11 years ago

I hate to be the guy- but how about just serving some html and some css?

jrochkind12• 11 years ago

I dunno, what do you think are the reasons media sites aren't doing that?

Ads? Tracking? What they think is a good design/UX that users will like, find easy and enjoyable to read, and associate with professionalism and credibility? (are they right or wrong?) Good UX for multi-media presentations? Social media sharing icons? Good UX for mobile? Comments features? Other stuff?

wahsd• 11 years ago

And facebook users are it's foot-soldiers. As long as people converge on Facebook and while Zuckerberg moves ever closer to his goal of replacing the internet with Facebook, the assault will not cease until the society has been subjugated and the internet domesticated.

GBKS• 11 years ago

Here's a quick illustration I put together recently to show the cruft of mobile news sites: https://dribbble.com/shots/2118552-DBC-News-Concept/attachme...

I hope this whole discussion is a bit of a wake-up call for news sites to get their priorities and tech straightened out.

Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

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