
GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB - _bxg1
https://twitter.com/fr3ino/status/1000166112615714816?s=19
======
wlll
The day I added an ad blocker (Adblock Plus, Ghostery and uBlock origin) was
the day my CPU fans stopped spinning almost constantly, my battery life
improved, web pages loaded faster and were more responsive.

My experience of the web is about a thousand times better than it used to be.

I will remove all these when the ad companies and websites start to behave
themselves, which will be never.

~~~
dman
If you liked the effect of installing an adblocker give disabling Javascript a
try. (You can selectively whitelist a small number of websites). Did this a
couple of years back and the difference is astounding.

~~~
jlarocco
I'd be willing to bet your "small number" of white listed websites is actually
a lot more than you think. Turning off Javascript breaks a ton of sites, IME.

Same thing with cookies.

On a side note, web developers have gotten really lazy at feature checking. In
the IE days they'd at least have a banner saying their page wasn't going to
work because it required IE or Netscape. Browsing with cookies turned off
nowadays, I hit one or two sites a day that won't even display and then often
get stuck in infinite redirect loop.

Even white listing sites to use cookies is a PITA. Outlook for Office65, for
example, requires white listing cookies from 3 or 4 domains, and due to the
way it redirects, I had to dig around in Chrome's page inspector to even find
out what those domains are. And of course the page itself gives no indication
of why it's not loading, it just flashes between empty pages forever.

~~~
ayosec
> I'd be willing to bet your "small number" of white listed websites is
> actually a lot more than you think. Turning off Javascript breaks a ton of
> sites, IME.

My experience is the opposite.

I used NoScript for almost 8 years, and then switched to uMatrix one year ago.

I don't need to enable JavaScript in most sites. And, if I need it, only
enable some parts of the page. Most websites are _much_ faster with this.

------
_bxg1
Websites can be "documents" or they can be "apps". It's great that we now have
the option to build the latter, but far too many things that should be simple
documents (news sites, I'm looking at you) are trying to be apps, and it's
virtually always a worse user experience, setting aside the cost in load time,
memory, and battery usage.

I'm saying this as a JavaScript developer.

~~~
TulliusCicero
The market has spoken.

No seriously, if it sucks so much, why haven't users responded by going
somewhere else, thus incentivizing sites to behave well?

~~~
_euvw
Or: the market does not (always) work. This too is an option.

~~~
TulliusCicero
Agreed, and my comment was partially as a response to the anti-regulation demo
here on HN.

But, it's still something worth probing into: if it really does make the user
experience worse -- and I agree it does -- why _haven 't_ people punished
those sites by going elsewhere?

My best guess is that it's like bad customer service: it bugs people, but it's
not really the differentiating factor when choosing a product/service
provider.

~~~
mmt
Don't be so sure people _aren 't_ going elsewhere. Besides craigslist, there's
also the not-Internet option, which I think many of us on here forget,
possibly largely because it's so seemingly difficult to measure (in our skewed
experience).

I've met _many_ young people who still default to pen-and-paper for things
like note-taking. It's tempting to dismiss them as luddites, but I can't
exactly blame them, given how much I know about just how user-hostile modern
computer software and hardware can be.

------
ocdtrekkie
I'm honestly starting to reach the opinion we should all be VPNing our web
traffic through Europe so we can pick up more of the benefits.

~~~
dominotw
Is anyone concerned that we are starting to replicate real world boundaries on
the internet.

Internet was supposed to free us from the limitations of the real world. World
of internet was supposed to be the one where you can fluidly switch between
your preceptions of self, become a new person whenever you felt like, leave
your past behind. This was supposed to be a new world where people see
themselves differently.

Now we have created countries on internet. Transferred our real world identity
onto internet. Masses were rushed into the internet before they were ready,
before they got the concept of what internet means psychologically. Now we
vast bureaucracies ruling the internet, so depressing. Depressing to see ppl
on HN saying "Good" to every GDPR news. Sad to see internet age squashed by
beurocracies right when it was getting started.

~~~
anvandare
The story of mankind, I'm afraid. A few people find a neat little spot where
they can hang out, and for a while things are great, everything is pretty
cool. Then, sooner or later, the group gets Too Big. Not so cool stuff starts
happening, and where formerly you had a small anarchic group that worked with
mutual understanding and (unspoken) agreements, now you have a need for Laws
and Enforcement and Bureaucracy.

Every beautiful place on Earth will sooner or later be exploited for mass
tourism and marketing. If you ever find such a place, keep it a secret, to
keep it intact.

~~~
teddyh
It’s a known pattern of subcultures. See _Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in
subculture evolution_ :

[https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths](https://meaningness.com/geeks-
mops-sociopaths)

------
Zash
I would be very happy if everyone followed this example. Think of this as
"modern" from now on. Return to the old, simple web that I know we all loved.
Keep the lessons in usability and design learned in the last decade or two.

~~~
rock_hard
Now we only need to find somebody to pay for that simple web....

~~~
bunderbunder
I think there's somewhat of a false dilemma there.

There are plenty of sites that I frequent that have tastefully located, static
banner ads that are served directly through the site operator rather than
through an add network. This has the dual advantage of allowing the operator
some editorial control, and of producing ads that tend to be much higher
quality (to me, anyway) because they involve actually telling me about new
products and services I might be interested in because they are related to the
actual content I'm reading, rather than being a giant pile of "one weird
trick" ads and targeted advertisers' sad attempts to sell me things I've
looked at before, and therefore either already bought or already decided not
to buy.

In essence, it would be a return to the kind of advertising that print media
uses. Which, incidentally, tends to command a higher price than all this junk,
anyway.

I've also done paid subscriptions to various journalistic websites in the
past. I've since stopped, generally because their reading experience is
generally so awful that I've retreated back to print media for such things. So
I suppose you could count me as one of those people who would be willing to
directly pay for a simple web. (It's not like I _prefer_ to kill trees. I just
value readability is all.)

~~~
dkarras
I don't think it is a false dilemma. The problem is about the difference
between the magnitude of revenue generated by the proposed methods. Both for
publishers AND people interested in advertising products.

Tasteful banners are nice but tracking the performance of such ads is very
hard. Ad business is really cut-throat. When you visit a site, there literally
are multiple ad networks / advertisers bidding for a spot in front of you,
with real money, based on the site, your location and your interests. A huge
network of autonomous trader bots that trade real money billions of times per
day for a spot in front of a human's eyeballs. If an algorithm decides that
you have a higher than normal probability of converting to a paying customer,
they (an AI or expert system) decides on the spot to pay "premium" to be in
front of your eyeballs. They do this while running A/B tests with different ad
variations to figure out what converts better, for which segment of the
population etc.

Modern ads are not only kind of targeted. They are INSANELY targeted. There
have been instances of people targeting singular people through ads based on
geolocation and interests.

A publisher cannot be expected to run all that bidding code on their own
servers. Those networks are actually a network of networks. If you are buying
ads today, you want analytics immediately to see how you are doing, how much
you are spending so that you can improve and adapt before sinking more money
on it.

The profits generated by such methods are a couple orders of magnitude higher
than a simple untrackable banner on a site placed by a site owner which gets
swapped out whenever...

------
simon_acca
For all that cannot access both versions, keep in mind that the EU one is a
vastly simpler UI, it almost looks like just a blog archive, while the US one
is a more feature full typical newspaper homepage. Not saying that either one
is better, just that it's not an apple to apple comparison.

~~~
DougBTX
> not an apple to apple comparison.

Hm, what if you’re a reader looking for journalistic text articles, is the
same content available on both?

~~~
simon_acca
I'm not a regular USA today reader, but from a brief look it seems like in the
EU version only the most recent ~30 articles are "reachable" by clicks from
the home page.

p.s. the EU version is on it's own subdomain, maybe you can reach it from the
US too: [https://eu.usatoday.com/](https://eu.usatoday.com/)

~~~
JohnTHaller
Nope, it redirects back to the regular one for US users.

~~~
nerbert
I’ve rarely seen a website load so fast on mobile...

------
orbitingpluto
So we've recently heard in the news that cryptocurrency mining supposedly
takes .5% of all global power.

Now compare that to the extra electricity required for everybody undergoing
the horrible experience of 80 poorly written trackers and ads constantly
overloading each tab in a web browser.

This reminds me of the American budget. Cut the funding for Planned Parenthood
and the Arts but we need a hundred new tanks!

~~~
makecheck
It’s similar to tons of paper wasted for flyers no one asked for. The people
spamming this stuff are never really held accountable for their environmental
footprint.

------
sigmonsays
i have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely
and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client. A single png image of
a entire web page is definitely under 5.2MB.

Personally, I can't wait for a shift in business practices. Ads have ruined my
confidence in privacy. Most sites share your data with over a dozen different
ad tracking vendors. I've seen twice that for a specific class of site, ie
thechive.com.

~~~
hk__2
> I have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely
> and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client.

Please never do that, unless you want your visitors to have the worst
accessibility experience.

~~~
jpetso
Yeah, but aren't startups and other profit-driven entities more interested in
catering to the mainstream than to a small set of users with specific needs?
If companies will gleefully ignore Linux (and BSDs), browsers other than the
ones that ship with a major OS, privacy concerns, free speech principles or
shipping to remote areas, I can't really expect them to care much for
marginalized groups such as people with accessibility issues.

~~~
hk__2
> Yeah, but aren't startups and other profit-driven entities more interested
> in catering to the mainstream than to a small set of users with specific
> needs?

How are "people on a smartphone" or "people with bad vision" small sets of
users? Also, rendering the whole page in a PNG file takes _more work_ than
merely serving the page as is, which is the second reason nobody does it (the
first one being "why would someone want such a shitty browsing experience?").

------
LeoPanthera
Even before the GDPR, text-only news sites seemed to be making a comeback. On
bad cellular connections, these two are great:

[https://lite.cnn.io/en](https://lite.cnn.io/en)

[https://text.npr.org](https://text.npr.org)

~~~
nitrohorse
These are also worth including:

[https://legiblenews.com](https://legiblenews.com)

[https://thecontext.net](https://thecontext.net)

------
pronik
I have a very strange feeling that GDPR will end up resetting the internet (in
a good way). It's already astonishing how we're getting unsubscribed from
every possible mailing list we didn't want to be on in the first place, and
it'll become even more awesome when all the websites will take notice, how
little they are allowed to do in terms of piling crap on top of their web
presence. I'm rather excited about the future right now.

------
mromanuk
Would be really cool to have a list of before and after (size drop), due to
GDPR in popular websites.

------
Animats
_They went from a load time of more than 45 seconds to 3 seconds, from 124 (!)
JavaScript files to 0, and from a total of more than 500 requests to 34._

Wow.

------
smsm42
When I see a site imploring me to disable my adblocker I think - nope, too
late, you ad people screwed up this thing forever, look for a new business
model. This one is dead. Or at least, it's dead for me. I am ok with having
reasonable number of ads. I am not ok with blowing up site 10x and making my
laptop max out CPU and my mobile devices get stuck trying to render all that
garbage.

------
chellam
How do you think free sites pay for producing all that valuable content? I
find it astonishing that most people seem to think having access to news for
free is almost a right. If you had taken their paid subscriptions they'd have
served you a less add riddled version.

~~~
pwg
Ads are perfectly capable of being served without javascript and without
cookies and without tracking users across the internet.

Serving ads requires exactly:

1) The HTML <img> tag.

2) Server side rendering (at least enough to insert a URL into the src=""
attribute of the <img> tags.

3) A webserver that responds to the URL's inserted in #2 above by supplying an
image.

That's it. And, in fact, in the beginning of ads on the internet, the above
was how all ads were served. But sites didn't care for it much, because they
had to do extra work to serve ads. And advertisers _very much_ did not like it
because they had to trust that their partner sites were truthful in their
reporting of add impressions (for the pay by impression model).

And having the advertiser be the one running "the server" of #3 above (which
would allow them to monitor impression counts) means that their partner sites
need to be kept up to date with the latest set of active URL's, lest some
<img> tags show the broken link icon. Also a huge hassle.

The JS ad frameworks came about because the ad networks realized if they could
lower the bar to gaining "ads" on a site, they could get more sites running
ads (the push went something like "now use 'ad world 2.0', now just a single
<script> tag in your website, no other work on your part").

And along the way the ad networks realized that the companies purchasing the
impressions were willing to pay more for impressions that might be more
"significant", and "relevant ads" were invented. Of course, the unstated,
behind the scenes, part of "relevant" was that in order to determine
"relevance" we now have to track and monitor the end users activities all
across the internet so that if we see J. Smith searching for cat food on
Amazon, we can now start serving him ads on facebook for catfood, and they
will be "relevant" because we know he is interested in cat food for some
reason.

So sites don't have to go "ad free" to also be "track your users activities
everywhere" free. They just have to return to the original model where the ad
was the internet equivalent of a highway bill-board or a poster on the side of
a bus-stop shelter. Untargeted, just there, maybe it is seen, maybe it is not.

~~~
cge
For that matter "untargeted" in this case just means "not targeted using
unrelated viewer data." There's a significant amount of targeting that can
take place by targeting based on the content and site. If anything, I would
argue that the obsessive ad-network, viewer-based targeting online often has
tremendous targeting failures as compared to traditional content-based
targeting.

I started distinctly noticing this over the last year or two in thinking about
how much more relevant I found advertisements in print magazines and journals
as online. In literary journals, I'll find advertisements from publishers
about their new releases in related topics. In scientific journals, I'll find
conferences, new lab equipment and products for related fields, and so on. In
design journals, I'll find advertisements for furniture, fabric, and so on. I
get one local art magazine mostly for the advertisements, which are primarily
new exhibition announcements. I actually somewhat enjoy seeing these sorts of
advertisements: they're clearly marked as ads, but they're also actually
useful. If, say, New England Biosciences puts out a kit with new features,
their advertising in Science can let me know about an option I might otherwise
not have heard about, for example.

Yet even before I started very strongly blocking as many ads and tracking
online as possible, the targeting was horrible by comparison. There were the
saturation-advertising systems, which would come up with wonderful decisions
like "this person just bought a new mattress; that must mean they buy
mattresses often, so let's show those advertisements" or "this word was used
somewhere in the website, let's show stuff tangentially related to that word,"
or "everyone is interested in ONE WEIRD TRICK." Most of the time, these
advertisements had nothing to do with me, or what I was reading, and they were
obnoxious and unhelpful. How this became the norm online, just because on some
rare occasions, the algorithms might work well, as opposed to the very well-
targeted advertisements in print publications, is quite confusing.

------
AnaniasAnanas
I wish that all sites provided alternative mini-versions such as this.

------
rayiner
This is great. (1) How do I pretend to be from the EU? (2) Th EU should make a
law requiring HTML versions of pages with no JS.

The evolution of the Internet in the last two decades has been such a
tremendous disappointment. It really peaked in the early 2000s (when I got my
first DSL connection but before JS became a thing).

~~~
ahallock
> Th EU should make a law requiring HTML versions of pages with no JS.

I know this is well-intentioned, but so is most authoritarianism. We don't
want to go down that road. Your personal preferences don't get to become law.

~~~
ddebernardy
Not so, it's about basic accessibility, so blind readers can use your site.
The EU could and probably should dig into that at some point too, and the rest
of the world will (hopefully) benefit. (I added hopefully because,
unfortunately, a number of websites have engaged in dick moves; namely
implementing GDPR protections for EU users only or blocking EU users
entirely.)

------
getcrunk
Their eu site only has access to a limited quantity of articles. Shame

------
kisstheblade
Tried to open the twitter link. Asked me to agree to their terms to continue
to use th service. Answered no. No the link just says "Oops, something went
wrong. Please try again later." (the link is
[https://twitter.com/i/flow/consent_violation_flow](https://twitter.com/i/flow/consent_violation_flow))

Gotta love the GDPR, a nice way to get rid of all the "social media" crap and
hundreds of ad trackers that has infested every corner of the internet.

~~~
jwilk
Archived copy will hopefully work better:

[https://archive.is/NX3VY](https://archive.is/NX3VY)

------
pickpuck
Looks like this is for all Gannett-owned newspapers, including my local paper
:D

------
znpy
And that's why people use as lockers.

------
urmish
what is more scary to me is 2 different versions of the same website for 2
different locations!

~~~
lccarrasco
Happens all the time (besides the obvious i18n) , especially with stuff that
has different regulations per country, like gambling.

~~~
sbov
Yep. They also block countries until they can be sure they can abide by their
regulations.

