The Bullshit Web - <AUTHOR> https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/ <comment><USER2> 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)

<comment><USER3> 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.

<comment><USER4> _> 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.

<comment><USER5> > 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.

<comment><USER4> 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.

<comment><USER5> > 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 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.

<comment><USER7> 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

<comment><USER8> >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.

<comment><USER9> 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.

<comment><USER10> 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.

<comment><USER11> 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.

<comment><USER12> 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.

<comment><USER11> 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.

<comment><USER12> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 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.

<comment><USER14> 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

<comment><USER15> 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.

<comment><USER16> Both of the public transit systems I use on a regular basis sell me monthly unlimited-use passes.

<comment><USER17> 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.

<comment><USER16> _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.

<comment><USER15> I did not claim that, please read more carefully.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 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.

<comment><USER19> 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.

<comment><USER20> > 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 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.

<comment><USER22> > _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.

<comment><USER23> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 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.

<comment><USER25> 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.

<comment><USER26>
      renice 19 ?

<comment><USER25> 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.

<comment><USER22> Also, I don't think there's a trivial way to get the PID of the process handling a particular tab.

<comment><USER27> In Chrome, Task Manager shows PID along with CPU & memory usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> 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.

<comment><USER29> >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.

<comment><USER28> 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.

<comment><USER29> > 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > 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?

<comment><USER31> 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.

<comment><USER32> 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!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> 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)

<comment><USER34> There are many chrome extensions that do the same thing

<comment><USER33> Except that my "corporate strategy" doesn't allow installing extensions. So a built-in tool is excellent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> 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.

<comment><USER36> 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

<comment><USER37> > _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.)

<comment><USER38> 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.

<comment><USER22> > _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).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> 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.

<comment><USER40> What's the postmaster supposed to be? Is it set in practice?

<comment><USER39> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> 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/)

</comment><comment><USER42> 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

<comment><USER43> Dillo! [https://www.dillo.org/](https://www.dillo.org/)

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

<comment><USER42> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> _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)

<comment><USER44> (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))

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> 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.

<comment><USER46> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> 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?

<comment><USER48> "This site uses cookies." _is the new_ "Hot singles in your area!"

<comment><USER40> On the bright side, these popups are safe for work and have no attached images.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> 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?)

<comment><USER50> >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.

<comment><USER49> True. Hopefully anti-competitive stuff like this will be challenged in court so we don't have to play the game.

<comment><USER51> 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.

<comment><USER49> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> 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.

<comment><USER42> 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.

<comment><USER22> 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.

<comment><USER42> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> 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.

</comment><comment><USER53> 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.

<comment><USER54> 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.

<comment><USER53> 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)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> 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!

</comment><comment><USER56> 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.

<comment><USER57> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> 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?

</comment><comment><USER58> 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.

</comment><comment><USER59> 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??!!

</comment><comment><USER60> 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.

</comment><comment><USER61> 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.

<comment><USER62> In other words: horror vacui

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> 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

</comment><comment><USER64> 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 ;)

<comment><USER65> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> 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.

<comment><USER67> 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....

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> 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.

</comment><comment><USER69> 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!

</comment><comment><USER70> 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.

</comment><comment><USER71> 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.

</comment><comment><USER72> 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.

<comment><USER73> uMatrix / uBlock seems to do what you want.

<comment><USER72> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> 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.

</comment><comment><USER75> 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?

<comment><USER22> > _\- minimize page weight - minimize duplicate content - minimize UI > variation - what else?_

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

<comment><USER75> Yes! That's a good one.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> 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.

</comment><comment><USER77> 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/)

</comment><comment><USER78> Everyone demands that the services of the internet have zero explicit cost. This means that all the cost is borne implicitly.

</comment><comment><USER79> It's not just the web, software in general is getting increasingly bloated.

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

</comment><comment><USER36> 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)

</comment><comment><USER80> 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.

</comment><comment><USER81> 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.

</comment><comment><USER82> 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.

</comment><comment><USER83> 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.

</comment><comment><USER84> 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...

</comment><comment><USER85> 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.

</comment><comment><USER86> 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

</comment><comment><USER87> >>"... 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.

</comment><comment><USER88> It's the _website obesity crisis_ in full swing

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

</comment><comment><USER89> 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.

<comment><USER90> 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!

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> [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.

</comment><comment><USER92> 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?

</comment><comment><USER93> 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.

</comment><comment><USER94> 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.

<comment><USER95> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> Here is non-bullshit cnn: [http://lite.cnn.io/en](http://lite.cnn.io/en)

</comment><comment><USER97> 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.

</comment><comment><USER98> 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).

</comment><comment><USER99> 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.

</comment><comment><USER100> 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

</comment><comment><USER90> 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.

<comment><USER101> Reading mode on safari does this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> 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/)

<comment><USER103> Not only that, but it also has 2 trackers on it (google analytics and carbonads). Hard to take this argument seriously.

<comment><USER65> 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.

<comment><USER103> Ah, you are right it is piwik. It was blocked by uBlock though and serves the same purpose (user tracking).

<comment><USER65> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> 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.

</comment><comment><USER105> 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

</comment><comment><USER106> Most websites are not optimized well because optimization costs money and software engineers are expensive. There probably is not a market failure here.

<comment><USER107> 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.

<comment><USER106> Agree, some bloat is due to ads and trackers, some are other things (like lack of optimization).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I appreciate that the author is doing what he's preaching: his page is less than 10 KB, including ads and (self-hosted) analytics.

</comment><comment><USER108> 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.

<comment><USER109> 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_

<comment><USER110> 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).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> Very relevant: [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com)

</comment><comment><USER112> 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/)

</comment><comment><USER113> This is why I need something like uMatrix to explicitly whitelist the text and leave the marketing wibble on the server.

</comment><comment><USER114> I should go work for a company that cares about this stuff. Time to go back to adding Adobe Launch on a dozen sites.

</comment><comment><USER42> [https://imgur.com/MRnd81J](https://imgur.com/MRnd81J)

</comment><comment><USER115> you only need to use a wifi connection on an airplane to see how painful things are - it's like a time warp

<comment><USER116> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER117> A good example of the Jevons Paradox

</comment><comment><USER118> 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.

<comment><USER119> Or just prefix the url with [https://outline.com/](https://outline.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER120> Is it a degradation of the web? Or it's just revolution of our hardware and internet speed?

</comment><comment><USER121> 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.

</comment><comment><USER122> 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..

<comment><USER123> You can still add all that bullshit with Jekyll. Having sites dynamically generated has nothing to do with bandwidth waste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> 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.

</comment><comment><USER125> 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.

</comment><comment><USER126> For this to change websites will have to stop chasing growth

</comment><comment> pure-awesome If we have the Dweb, does that make this the Bweb?

</comment><comment><USER52> This is so monstrously correct! Kudos!

</comment><comment><USER127> Appstore based browser.

</comment><comment><USER128> browse in w3m. problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER129> 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.

<comment><USER66> What do you mean by "bloat is on the mobile side"?.

<comment><USER129> 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.

<comment><USER130> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER131> 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.</comment>


Former Google and Facebook execs are sounding alarms about the power of tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/01/silicon-valley-eating-soul-google-facebook-tech <comment><USER2> I tire of the traditional media's need to write a negative story about how Facebook is cancer, and then throw in a legitimate company like Apple or Google to make it "Facebook and Google" are cancer. And this instance is particularly obtuse because the "former Google and Facebook execs" are the _president_ of Facebook, and some random product manager from Google. There's only one former president of Facebook and there are probably 20000 former Google product managers. The latter guy is just some rando.

<comment><USER3> About The Guardian in particular, I've been saying this for a while. [0]

I'll quote #peoplewindow's reply, broadly agreeing with my comment:

>The Guardian has been pushing the line that non-Guardian news sources are 'dangerous for democracy' for a long time now. Other similar publications like the NYT have the same viewpoint.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15573111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15573111)

<comment><USER4> Utter nonsense.

Check out the Guardian's history and structure:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian)

The Guardian is about as good as you're going to get in terms of a mainstream outlet being able to take an objective view here. Pretty much the opposite of Facebook.

<comment><USER3> >The Guardian is about as good as you're going to get in terms of a mainstream outlet being able to take an objective view here.

 _That_ statement is nonsense.

Of course The Guardian can't possible be objective w.r.t. Facebook.

Facebook and The Guardian are _competitors_ in the market for online advertising.

edit: double-down

<comment><USER5> GP's statement is fairly accurate and so is yours. _All_ mainstream news outlets are competitors in the online ad market, and The Guardian _is_ about as good as you get in terms of independence and objectivity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The old idea of the online world as a burgeoning utopia looks to have peaked > around the time of the Arab spring

The only people who thought the "arab spring" was a burgeoning utopia are western military, intelligence, and political elites.

Now those same people see these platforms as a threat and so the "respectable" media is full of anti-SV stories.

> it's all automated; the owners of the system can't possibly monitor > everything that's going on, and they can't control it

Yes, that is the real problem: communications that can't be censored and controlled.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure you read this very well. The notion is not that the Arab spring was a utopia. The notion was that the Arab spring, fueled by direct person-to- person connection on FB, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc, were symptomatic of the Internet's power to create freedom and social utopia.

It's part of a persistent strain of technoutopianism. You might read Tom Standage's excellent 1998 book "The Victorian Internet", which talks about the adoption of the telegraph during the Victorian era. Many of the same things people said about the Internet's power to change society were said about the telegraph: [https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable- Ninetee...](https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nineteenth- line/dp/162040592X)

<comment><USER8> Telegraphs didn't have dopamine feedback loops via feedback such as "likes".

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure that's material to my point, but assuming you're just starting a tangent, I'd disagree. They had replies.

It was not as immediate and exciting as modern technology, but it was way more exciting than what previously existed. People even fell in love by telegraph. See, for example, the 1880 novel "Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes": [https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/26/wired-love- romance...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/26/wired-love-romance- novel-technology_n_3654634.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe because I love Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs, and Henry Thoreau, or maybe because between Steve Jobs' and Bill Gates' legacies, I chose Richard Stallman's, but I've never felt any appeal from Silicon Valley.

Maybe visiting might change my view, but the realizations in the article seem obvious and late enough that I think I understand the appeal but don't share the values.

<comment><USER10> The (disruptive) power of Silicon Valley stems mainly from investors. Make a pile of money high enough, and you can disrupt anything; that's the premise, basically.

It is not really the power of tech that we should be worried about, but instead the power of investment without regard for anything other than shareholder returns. Google and Facebook could be better companies if they didn't have to sell their users to their real customers.

<comment><USER11> The money doesn't do it alone. You can't have technological disruption without technology.

<comment><USER12> What technology has Facebook given us besides React, a PHP compiler and low- power server racks? For that matter, what does Facebook even disrupt?

I venture that the technology is usually already there, but the _business_ exploitation is what's different in the dominant companies.

<comment><USER11> Facebook operates mostly in the realm of social communication/organization and general information sharing, so that is where the "disruption" would take place.

I'm rather skeptical of Facebook though. I think there are major issues with its current incarnation.

<comment><USER12> _Facebook operates mostly in the realm of social communication /organization and general information sharing, so that is where the "disruption" would take place._

Sure, but GP was talking about technological disruption.

<comment><USER11> Facebook uses technology to carry out its core operations, so would not they be performing technological disruption of the social domain?

<comment><USER12> If they meant social they would have said social.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yeah, this "alarms" are just a way to call for regulations that will in practice pull up the ladder so other companies will never be able to climb where fb or google stand now. This has always happened in all industries: some companies become big and then they use the excuse of limiting their own power to close off the competitions to enter the market, in fact stabilizing their power and creating a REAL monopoly. I don't understand how can informed people still fall for this move.

<comment><USER12> I've been speculating for months that these companies would _love_ to rotate out some of their VPs into a regulatory body in order to give their policies the force of law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple - all need to be shut down in their present form. The biggest problem is that our anti-competitive legislation is ill- equipped to handle tech monopolies.

The extremely complex nature of modern software and its ability to offer unparalled distribution advantage is nothing like the world has ever seen. The ability of Google to push something like a chrome browser comes not only from its galleons of highly paid engineers, but also its ability to advertise/support it for free for decades to come. There simply does not exist another sustainable model to finance a complex product like an internet browser and provide it for free to consumers for decades.

The bigger problem is what is the form of regulation that could be applied to such behemoths. Its extremely hard to regulate it by a case-to-case basis, similar to what happenned in telecom, simply because the business models are too complex and different products monetize differently.

I think a line of thought which might yield some regulatory possibilities is to limit these companies manpower. No single company should be allowed to employ more than X number of engineers. If they go above, they should be required to spin of into multiple entities, each of which do no more than X number of engineers. I dont know what X is - but that is open for deliberation.

The impact that something like this could have on say Google is that Google is forced to split apart its search business with the ads business. This further allows the search business to collaborate with more ad providers to find the best fit. And on the other side, it allows its ads business to experiment with more search providers and open up a market for profitable search engines.

This is not something I have completely thought through, but whatever little I have, this seems to be the cleanest approach to fix tech.

<comment><USER15> Why is it not ok for tech companies to be big, but a-ok for telecom, oil, banks, law firms, audit firms, and all the other traditional companies to be huge?

The cynic in me wonders if it's simply "old conservative money holders" being upset about the "new liberal rich." Ever since Trump took power, the media has been beating the "evil tech company" drums loudly and clearly.

<comment><USER14> > Why is it not ok for tech companies to be big, but a-ok for telecom, oil, > banks, law firms, audit firms, and all the other traditional companies to be > huge?

The thing which makes tech companies different from every other is the 'infrastructure' effect of software and the absence of 'geographical' limits on monopolies.

Banks, law firms, audit firms are fundamentally limited by geography. A law firm in New York will find it very hard to service clients in San Francisco without having employees there. Tech firms arent 'boxed' in by these limits, which are preset for most traditional businesses, thereby greatly expands their ability to become monopolies and strangle competition.

The other advantage that tech companies have is the fundamentally additive nature of software. Microsoft made a very good OS few decades back, but its ability to keep releasing a competitive OS builds on the work piled on by decades of engineering. It is simply impossible for a startup to release another version of an OS which can compete with Microsoft Windows.

However, if we were to break up Windows into pieces, it opens up the possiblity for a new startup to innovate on a part of the OS and buy existing pieces from the vendors of each part to ship a new offering.

<comment><USER16> I mean, what you are effectively arguing is that Microsoft's OS is so freaking awesome and amazing and good for consumers, that no other competitor is able to provide value to consumers as much as microsoft is.

And your solution is effectively to make Microsoft's products worse, so that a different, lower quality product is able to compete.

What about instead of that, we do the thing that helps consumers, instead of hurting them?

<comment><USER17> The error in your assumption is that windows wins because its "so freaking awesome" and not because of secondary effects that microsoft has imposed on the market via its ability to effectively force adoption of stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe the difference between those that feel fulfilled in life and those who don't are the addiction loops we've found our way into.

It would be nice to hack those loops in a meaningful way. Make creation a drip fed, nicely chunked, and skinner box filled experience.

There are some methods like pomodoro but something software based to use these novel approaches could do a lot of good for the world.

<comment><USER19> B. F. Skinner's box was a scheme for performing controlled experiments. The point was to isolate complex systems (minds) so simple hypotheses about their operation could be falsified or supported. It was scientifically successful.

My mother of blessed memory, daughter of two professors of psychology, in her childhood lived next door to Dr. Skinner on St. Ronan Street in New Haven, CT, USA. Myth in my family says my grandparents had the good sense to refuse a request to make Mom a subject in that box.

In the 21st century West no academic psychologist would even propose using a Skinner box on human subjects. Their institutional review boards (IRBs: scientific ethics watchdogs) would just laugh.

It might be interesting, as an experiment in ethics, to propose some aspect of Facebook's attention hacking as if it were an experiment, and see what IRBs make of it.

In the meantime: human complexity good, Skinner boxes bad. Please be careful.

<comment><USER20> Totally based on hearsay, but: a family member worked with a person who was the child of a research associate of Skinner and that person and their sibling were used as informal research subjects by their parents. Both of them were extremely disturbed humans, and while I never asked for specifics there were whispers of some very dark doings.

<comment><USER21> There probably ought to be laws against psychology grads having kids. They simply can't resist experimenting on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ugh, the media has clearly been waiting around for a day when they can cast tech as the bad guy. Russians on Facebook and iPhone batteries are just not that big of a deal.

<comment><USER23> i really wish they would get off this 'we lost the election because of misinformation on facebook so something has to be done about it' rhetoric.

leaked emails (by help of the russians) surely helped trump, but even democrats concede that information was TRUE. this has nothing to do with social media, but training in the DNC about phishing scams might help.

but honestly, there were so many huge flaws in the hillary campaign (relying 100% on data that was already proven in the primaries to be next to useless, disgust over the shadyness in how the clintons took over the dnc and stacked the deck against sanders, etc).

and lets face it, they didnt have a problem with the internet when obama was using it to win, such as 'obama universities' training people to use a pyramid network on social media to basically create broadcast storms to get the algorithms to push their content to the top and shout out dissenting opinions.

<comment><USER24> Im not sure that many people voted for any of the individuals.

Hillary represented the establishment. The last two presidents were a huge and dramatic shift away from status quo.

I think people are voting for the least likely to be a part of the machine. I wonder what happens when the people realize any candidate who gets into the primary is part of the machine ?

<comment><USER25> > I wonder what happens when the people realize any candidate who gets into > the primary is part of the machine ?

They stop voting like half the country already has.

<comment><USER23> a lot of them has simply given up, hence the opiod crisis

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "I got rich by doing this but you definitely shouldn't."

Hard to take this kind of attitude seriously. Things seemed fine enough when they were working there, so what has changed?

<comment><USER27> Talking about it no longer affects their livelihood?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't think it's a difficult tweak to the feed algorithms to allow for 5% (picked randomly) of diverging viewpoints in somebody's feed. It might even be good for their engagement metrics.

<comment><USER29> Agree. I wish there were actually a slider that you could adjust that would increase the X factor of the algorithm. I'd possibly use Facebook if it weren't just the same 6 people every time I went on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Not surprising to hear this kind of fear mongering from newspapers like guardian and Nytimes. They are the most threatened by Facebook and Google. Their breakfast, lunch and dinner got eaten by these companies so now they are using these narratives to advance their agendas. American tech companies are just fine. They are run by reasonable people. Bezos actually bought WashingtonPost so it does not die.

<comment><USER31> >Bezos actually bought WashingtonPost so it does not die.

Thats a very charitable reading of what he did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Before social network manipulation there was mass media manipulation. Social networks just made it global.

</comment><comment><USER33> Tech will only eat your soul if you let it.

<comment><USER34> In secular world views there is no such thing as a soul, thus it can not be eaten. Finding the proper language for these phenomena is however an interesting topic.

<comment><USER35> Enough people either have a dualist world view or are familiar enough with the idea that soul seems to be a serviceable word.

<comment><USER34> Well, my point is that you can not believe that your soul is being eaten without believing in the metaphysical framework(s) from which the concept emerged, otherwise the parent comment makes no sense. The closest secular definition you get is System 1.

<comment><USER36> Thank you for being pedantic over a word literally (yes, literally) everyone reading it, yourself included, understood and interpreted correctly to mean the author's intent. You are providing a valuable service.

 _/ sarcasm_

<comment><USER34> I am sorry for that, but it is not obvious to me at all. Thats why I commented. One of the problems online is one of meaning, communication, context, definitions etc that we actually understand what someone is trying to convey. You for example felt the need to use a sarcasm expression, as you were unsure of me actually "getting" it.

<comment><USER37> You spend too much time on the computer.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple ad focuses on iPhone's most marketable feature – privacy - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/14/apple-ad-focuses-on-iphones-most-marketable-feature-privacy/ <comment><USER2> Except if you live in China</comment>