
The Bullshit Web - codesections
https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/
======
cheezymoogle
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](http://txti.es/theneedforplaintext)

~~~
soared
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.

~~~
throwawaymath
_> 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.

~~~
notheguyouthink
> 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.

Clearly they disagree. Or maybe you should let them know that they don't need
that.

To say it without sarcasm, what you feel you are entitled as a paying customer
and what they feel they need/want to understand their customers are clearly at
odds. Ultimately, what you think matters nothing in isolation and what they
think matters nothing in isolation. What you two agree upon, is the only thing
that matters. That is to say, if you think they shouldn't track you but you
use their tracking product anyway, you've compromised and agreed to new terms.

I imagine you could come up with a subscription that would adequately
compensate them for a truly no tracking experience. But I doubt you two would
agree on a price to pay for said UX.

~~~
throwawaymath
You're correct of course, but I don't really see how this isn't a vacuous
observation. Yes clearly our perceptions are at odds, but that has nothing to
do with the reality of whether or not they _need_ to be doing that tracking.
Obviously they think they need to, or they wouldn't do it. But I think I've
laid out a pretty strong argument that they actually _don 't_ need to, which
leads me to believe that they actually haven't considered it seriously enough
to give it a shot.

Would they be as profitable? Maybe, maybe not. Would they become unprofitable?
No, strictly speaking. I'm confident in that because the NYT weathered the
decline of traditional news media before the rise or hyper-targeted ads, and
because I've maintained a _free_ website in the Alexa top 100,000 _on my own_
, with well over 500,000 unique visitors per day. That doesn't come close to
the online audience of a major newspaper, but it's illustrative. There is a
phenomenal amount of advertising optimization you can do using basic analytics
based on page requests and basic demographic data that still respects privacy
and doesn't track individual users. I outlined a few methods, such as Daring
Fireball's.

Maybe instead of this being a philosophical issue of perspective between a
user and an organization, it's an issue of an organization that hasn't
examined how else it can exist. Does the NYT need over 10,000 employees? Is
there a long tail of unpopular and generally underperforming content that
nevertheless sticks around, sucking up money and forcing ever more privacy-
invasive targeting? If the NYT doesn't know its audience well enough to
present demographic-targeted ads on particular articles and sections, what the
hell is it doing tracking users _individually_? It's just taking the easy way
out and giving advertising partners the enhanced tracking they want. But they
don't _need_ to do that, and whether or not they _think_ they need to do it is
orthogonal to the problem itself.

~~~
notheguyouthink
> You're correct of course, but I don't really see how this isn't a vacuous
> observation. Yes clearly our perceptions are at odds, but that has nothing
> to do with the reality of whether or not they need to be doing that
> tracking. Obviously they think they need to, or they wouldn't do it. But I
> think I've laid out a pretty strong argument that they actually don't need
> to, which leads me to believe that they actually haven't considered it
> seriously enough to give it a shot.

It most definitely is. But so is the word _need_ , in this context. How would
we define what they need to do, and what they don't need to do?

My argument is simply such that, of course they don't need to _(by my
definition)_ , but nothing will change that unless they see a different, more
lucrative offer. Ie, "oh hey, here's 2 million readers who will only read the
page in plain html and will pay an extra $20/m". It just seems like a needless
argument, as I don't believe there's anything that can change their behavior
without us changing ours. Without the market changing.

Rather, I think the solution lies not in them, but in you. In us. To use
blockers and filters to such an extreme degree that it's made clear that UX
wins here, and they need to provide the UX to retain the customers.

Thus far, we've not done enough to change their "need". If a day comes that
they do need to stop tracking us, well, they'll either live or die. But the
problem, and solution, lies in us. My 2c.

------
ukulele
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.

~~~
isoprophlex
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

~~~
dgudkov
>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.

~~~
russdpale
Sure, if your content sucks. If you need all that bullshit to stay profitable
then perhaps the business isn't really needed at all. "but that is the
industry competition for you, everyone does it."

To that, all I can say is perhaps some regulation is required to level the
playing field.

~~~
true_religion
Strictly speaking, most individual business isn't needed.

If the NY Times folds tomorrow due to bankruptcy, there are dozens of other
papers where we can get the news. Their reporting is good, and I choose them
over their competitors but losing them wouldn't be the end of news as we know
it.

That's the case with most businesses---the marketing and sales are only needed
to _compete_ , whereas without them the product would still exist for
consumers.

~~~
smadge
Your choice of journalism as an example is unsettling. If the New York Times
goes out of business, there is no guarantee that another news publisher will
break the same stories. Some things will just not be investigated anymore and
some important stories will just not be told.

~~~
bena
But doesn't that hold true regardless? The presence of the New York Times
means there are certain stories not being investigated or told. And we aren't
even fully aware. We have no idea if those stories would be of more worth to
us or not.

~~~
smadge
Can you elaborate more? I was working with the model that more investigative
journalism is better, but you seem to be suggesting that the presence of some
news outlets inhibits others.

~~~
bena
Just in a basic sense. The NYT employs X people, sells to Y people, etc. Those
are people who won't be employed by someone else, people who won't buy another
paper.

There's a sort of critical mass of "news" that can be made. We can't _all_ be
investigative journalists.

So whatever that would be here instead of the NYT might be different, it might
not be worse. It could be just as good, just different.

Of course, it could be worse. It could be better. We can't know.

------
makecheck
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.

~~~
jancsika
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

~~~
fwip
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.

~~~
ubernostrum
Both of the public transit systems I use on a regular basis sell me monthly
unlimited-use passes.

~~~
sixstringtheory
That’s nothing more than marketing.

Do you ride more because it’s unlimited? When you get to your stop for your
office or dinner or whatever, do you go back home and then back again before
getting off? Do you go all the way to the end of the line to minimize your
cost per mile, then walk back to your actual destination?

Of course not, you use it as efficiently as possible to do the thing you used
public transit to actually _get to_.

Do you consider the money you spend for your unlimited pass as rent for
housing or office space? Do you just stay on the bus all day, working on your
laptop and holding meetings?

Unlimited transit passes are similar to unlimited vacation plans: people
normally need and use much less than 100% of the resource offered. People also
don’t normally push 100% bandwidth 24/7 through their unlimited plans.

If everyone decides to use their unlimited transit pass in this way, they will
go away or increase in price accordingly.

~~~
ubernostrum
_Of course not, you use it as efficiently as possible to do the thing you used
public transit to actually _get to_._

The comment I replied to claimed transit systems don't sell unlimited-ride
passes. I was pointing out that some of them do. What you're arguing is they
wouldn't have the capacity to handle it if every person bought such a pass and
immediately ceased all activities other than riding transit 24/7, which may
well be true, but is also a non sequitur.

Though since you ask, it would be a bit difficult for me to "maximize" use of
my Caltrain pass in the way you're suggesting, since going "all the way to the
end of the line to minimize your cost per mile, then walk back to your actual
destination" is not realistic -- the line is ~80 miles long.

~~~
fwip
I did not claim that, please read more carefully.

------
nostromo
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
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.

~~~
goatlover
> 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.

------
pasta
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _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.

~~~
eadmund
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.

------
pmarreck
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.

~~~
simmons
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

      renice 19 ?

~~~
simmons
It's my understanding that renice doesn't limit CPU usage, but rather adjusts
the process's priority in the scheduler relative to other processes. So I
don't think it would stop a process from eating up all available idle cycles,
draining the battery, and ramping up the fan.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Also, I don't think there's a trivial way to get the PID of the process
handling a particular tab.

~~~
kps
In Chrome, Task Manager shows PID along with CPU & memory usage.

------
ryanianian
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.

~~~
krapp
>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.

~~~
ryanianian
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.

~~~
krapp
> You're not entitled to their content on whatever terms you decide are fair
> or not.

Yes I am. I'm entitled to whatever content their server returns in response to
my user-agent's request, and I'm entitled to filter and alter that content in
any way I choose, including not running javascript and blocking advertising.

If they want to put content behind a paywall, fine - good luck getting anyone
to consider their content worth paying for, though. Otherwise, it's fair game.
That's the way the web works, and that's the way it's always worked.

------
scarygliders
> 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?

~~~
foepys
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.

~~~
ryandrake
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!”

------
moviuro
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...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-
web-pages)

[1] [https://radiobruxelleslibera.com/2018/06/26/intermediated-
of...](https://radiobruxelleslibera.com/2018/06/26/intermediated-of-the-world-
unite/)

[2]
[https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/smexxUICwLXKbzEEbLlIPQ_qGc...](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/smexxUICwLXKbzEEbLlIPQ_qGcKxqVaGtRUkArPHtnk1vcZgoRDOld8-wAwHE4_S4RqU4Fcpc7RPX8vLdxItAZIs_KsV-
YgdkU5l58xP3OSpu7HDjTxm9X4QgHw1-oqrHC68AuQk-
U_0uUyriv0pMedeZn9nzTxD7IvxRvSrdXDhpIARigFOuqdxJfDjEzGM10mFKV_rqO_6DWU_5z2H8gEHRoo5_p_KEJAfjRVr18dUzXcI0B-rdyuYHkXHFztHyb8l0NIHtwnbYi7Ax-
IwPLh3SBT33KnCkm5fp-z4M-J0tU5XPrEx-5Hu7yivtsETyFZw7SVd1aQVhQlX3PnWMRt3tS1c1YirpbY_Z3v_YNzKoG4L15ItUyX3QaUwbKsVL7qE7jwGWs8losF1xMQV1Azs0b1ZizuqzW_Wj715ng4SRa5W1jv5l00Ce0QEs5m9jAKSfX1G7dx0T99l8RN35C6aTvJ29mTdov7nwviuxKcwZduKM52HcV3MsN4qERPxCM6suJShdGJZdYvJuSncaJD9ijFvqmDgYFpZQLbGz20qN6fLGI5r1kiGhzfaX2K29E3Wf19gPLW8UPq3P_m7wQvyGrBLma6TA5hIBlO-=w720-h823-no)
(that's a screenshot on photos.google.com - don't have access to imgur or
similar)

~~~
shthed
There are many chrome extensions that do the same thing

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

------
edhelas
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.

~~~
moolcool
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_lishin
> _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.)

~~~
jerf
Web Slack does system notifications. You may have to turn them on explicitly
because it requires a permission (can't recall if you do or if it prompts you,
but it is something you have to enable), but if it's working in my Linux
browser I'm assuming it works in Windows and OSX. I don't know if that would
also integrate with in-dock notifications or not. If so, making it a viable
alt-tab target would just be running it in a separate browser window, which
should still net many fewer used resources than a separate app.

If you are happy, no problem. I'm posting for general info.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _can 't recall if you do or if it prompts you, but it is something you have
> to enable_

It does. In fact, it keeps displaying an annoying blue-colored topbar telling
you that your life will be better if you enable notifications (fortunately,
with the option to snooze it or dismiss it completely on given machine).

------
Sir_Cmpwn
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.

~~~
user5994461
What's the postmaster supposed to be? Is it set in practice?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
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/](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.

------
htor
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://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

------
agumonkey
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](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
Dillo! [https://www.dillo.org/](https://www.dillo.org/)

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

~~~
agumonkey
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.

------
GuiA
_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...](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computers-
struggle-match-input-latency-apple-iie)

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

------
mikeabraham
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.

~~~
wildrhythms
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.

------
cocoa19
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
"This site uses cookies." _is the new_ "Hot singles in your area!"

~~~
user5994461
On the bright side, these popups are safe for work and have no attached
images.

------
dkoston
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?)

~~~
superkuh
>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.

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

~~~
Avamander
Yandex does it too with their own tech, just mentioning. I think if it
actually were standardized properly without a monopoly it could become a good
thing.

~~~
dkoston
Good to know.

Agree that if there was a body with representation from all major engines,
this could be good.

I personally don’t want my content to be served in such a way that requires me
to use a specific analytics product though. Would be ok with it if log access
was part of the standard.

------
soared
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.

~~~
agumonkey
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

~~~
agumonkey
It's hard to educate people too. You have to go hard and deep to convince them
enough not to spend money on their next mall trip.

------
mxuribe
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.

------
duxup
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
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.

~~~
duxup
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)

------
z3phyr
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!

------
stickfigure
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.

~~~
liquidwax
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.

------
z3phyr
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?

------
jjuhl
One reason why I subscribe to [https://lwn.net/](https://lwn.net/) is that it
is a fast _no bullshit_ web site. Another is the _great_ content.

------
S_A_P
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??!!

------
nojvek
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.

------
kaitari
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
In other words: horror vacui

------
tabtab
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

------
NKCSS
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 ;)

~~~
nickheer
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.

------
wuliwong
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.

~~~
dredmorbius
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....

------
tylerjwilk00
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
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!

------
awinder
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.

------
thecombjelly
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.

------
eterm
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.

~~~
slig
uMatrix / uBlock seems to do what you want.

~~~
eterm
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.

------
zerb
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.

------
buchanae
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?

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _\- minimize page weight - minimize duplicate content - minimize UI
> variation - what else?_

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

~~~
buchanae
Yes! That's a good one.

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

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

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

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

------
techbio
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/](https://www.freeformatter.com/)

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

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

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

------
moolcool
Mirror:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vcwVnj...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vcwVnjhHivMJ:https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-
web/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)

------
lsiebert
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.

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

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

------
BLKNSLVR
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.

------
dm33tri
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.

------
jstewartmobile
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...

------
tombh
This is in part why I'm developing
[https://html.brow.sh](https://html.brow.sh) \- a purely text-based web,
rendered by a fast _remote_ modern browser.

------
tlrobinson
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

------
toss1
>>"... 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.

------
splittingTimes
It's the _website obesity crisis_ in full swing

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820445)

------
titzer
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.

~~~
giardini
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!

------
royroyroys
[http://www.textfiles.com](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.

------
RileyJames
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?

------
ankurdhama
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.

------
azernik
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.

~~~
baud147258
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.

------
nabla9
Here is non-bullshit cnn: [http://lite.cnn.io/en](http://lite.cnn.io/en)

------
JoshMnem
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.

------
StillBored
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).

------
TekMol
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.

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

------
giardini
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
Reading mode on safari does this.

------
waivek
This static website seems to be down.

Archive link:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20180731143228/https://pxlnv.com/...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180731143228/https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-
web/)

~~~
tarr11
Not only that, but it also has 2 trackers on it (google analytics and
carbonads). Hard to take this argument seriously.

~~~
nickheer
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.

~~~
tarr11
Ah, you are right it is piwik. It was blocked by uBlock though and serves the
same purpose (user tracking).

~~~
nickheer
Fair. I take what I think is a reasonable and respectful approach, though: it
takes only a partial IP address (which I don't look at), it respects Do Not
Track, it anonymizes as much as possible, and it's basically a glorified hit
counter. It's pretty lightweight, it's the only analytics script I use, and
it's localized rather than sending users' data to a giant company.

This article should not be seen as an all-or-nothing approach. It's more the
amount and type that concerns me.

------
actionowl
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.

------
modzu
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

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

~~~
pdonis
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.

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

------
baud147258
I appreciate that the author is doing what he's preaching: his page is less
than 10 KB, including ads and (self-hosted) analytics.

------
tenaciousDaniel
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
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
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).

------
codethief
Very relevant:
[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com)

------
mirimir
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...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/24/politics/michael-cohen-donald-trump-
tape/)

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

------
jwhiz22
I should go work for a company that cares about this stuff. Time to go back to
adding Adobe Launch on a dozen sites.

------
agumonkey
[https://imgur.com/MRnd81J](https://imgur.com/MRnd81J)

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

~~~
olyjohn
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.

------
antuneza
A good example of the Jevons Paradox

------
MrStonedOne
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
Or just prefix the url with [https://outline.com/](https://outline.com/)

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

------
hutzlibu
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.

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

------
hackeraccount
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.

------
icedchai
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.

------
pacifika
For this to change websites will have to stop chasing growth

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

------
mxuribe
This is so monstrously correct! Kudos!

------
iamgopal
Appstore based browser.

------
crasshopper
browse in w3m. problem solved.

------
Alex3917
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.

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

~~~
Alex3917
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.

~~~
brisance
You may wish to re-read the article, right from the beginning. Mobile phones
are already faster and better than the author's computer attached to his 56K
modem way back then.

------
notatoad
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.

