All you need to 'fix' this is a fast loading news website that gets enough paid subscribers to earn enough margin from subscriptions that you can pay for a news staff, an office, and various overheads.

That is a longish way of saying that 99.9% of the overhead in any modern web site can be traced almost entirely to the mechanisms by which that web site is attempting to extract value from you for visiting/reading.

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

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

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

But if you're paying, the pages don't load any different. You're paying to be mined.

The difference is the tracking. I don’t think ads are really the problem. It’s the tracking that bloats pages and intrudes on privacy, and the tracking doesn’t need to be there because other media have ads without tracking and manage just fine.

There’s a race to the bottom here. Tracking earns more revenue, so to be competitive you have to do it. Most sites won’t stop tracking until forced to by either the basic infrastructure of the web or legal requirements. I hope GDPR will lead to the disappearance of tracking, but so far most sites seem to pretend tracking is compatible with GDPR.

I'm not saying I like it that way, but you're conflating two unrelated things.

What you are paying for is a broader choice in the filler between the commercials.

It should be noted that traditional newspapers include ads alongside news content and no one complains. In fact people used to sift through the Sunday NYT simply for the ads.

That's called "native advertisement" and it's supposed to trick you into thinking you're reading a genuine article instead of an ad. I actively avoid sites that do this.

> In fact people used to sift through the Sunday NYT simply for the ads.

Back when people couldn't google for stuff, and the ads were useful because they mostly came from local businesses you actually needed once in a while.

But I guess you could say that you are paying for delivery instead.

Called Newshound, it let you set up to face sets of keywords (in the basic $5/month subscription), and it would email you the plain text of every article that matched the criteria, whether generated within the publisher network or from wire services.

Or you can just visit it, I suppose.

It's really the ultimate condemnation of modern web design that this feature is so useful.

Edit: won't help the data-consumption though, as I believe it can only be enabled after the page has loaded

Given the lack of popularity and commercial support, combined with the complexity to connect a client with an available server (compared with downloading an app from the store), I'd expect that they are populated mostly by old tech people or passers-by from universities; and any special interest group would have small user base coming from that demographic profile. Are my assumptions correct?

Well, that and the fact that front-end developers just can't seem to exist without pulling in hundreds of kilobytes, or even megabytes, of JS libraries. You actually don't need all that crap to serve adverts, or really even to do tracking: people managed without it in the 90s. It's just that it's more work to get the same effect without a buttload of JS in this day and age, and most third party tracking services involve their own possibly bulky JS lib[1]. The thing is, given the slim margins on ad-serving - whilst I don't condone it - I can see why people don't bother to put in the extra effort to slim their payloads.

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

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17383464

While I sympathize with this sentiment, this is also the entire history of computing in a nutshell. Moore's Law has driven us orders of magnitude beyond where we were when personal computers first came into existence; but Wirth's law[1] has kept pace. The laptop I'm typing this on right now has 8 GB of RAM, and that's already become pathetically tiny, pretty much the minimum viable for a consumer PC; I have to keep checking my memory usage or I'll spill over into swap (on a mechanical drive) and have to wait several minutes while my computer recovers.

Performance in computer applications fundamentally doesn't improve. Stuff gets prettier, sure, and applications do more. But things will still run about as slowly as they always have, sometimes a little worse. (There are exceptions - some things like loading programs from tape, or loading things from an HDD once SSDs were invented, were so painfully slow compared to their replacement that you'd have to actively try to write slow code to get anywhere near that performance.) It's ease of programming, flexibility, and freedom of design (in aesthetics and interface) that the advance of computing technology has always enabled. And all of those are extremely valuable in their own way, and can make applications genuinely better - even allowing qualitatively new things to come into existence that wouldn't have been feasible before - even if they don't run faster or take up less of your memory.

(To understand why, think about the development of - say - computer games since the 90s. For all that we mock poorly optimized games, how inaccessible would game development be if we required them to be coded as efficiently as Carmack built Doom? For all that mindlessly chasing "better graphics" has ballooned costs and led developers to compromise on gameplay, how many games simply couldn't be translated to 90s-era graphics without fatally compromising the experience? How many projects would never have been started if we set the skill floor for devs so high that a hobbyist couldn't just download Unity and start writing "shitty" code?)

(Or think about something like Python. Python is a perfect example of something that allows devs to massively sacrifice performance just to make programming less work. If we kept our once-higher-by-necessity standards for efficient usage of resources, something like Python's sluggish runtime would be laughable. But I think you, and I, and everyone else can agree that Python is a very good thing.)

[1] "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away."

I saw a discussion on HN a few months back about a survey of computer hardware, and one dev in the comments was shocked - shocked! - to find out that the typical user didn't have 16 GB and a 4k screen. That definitely rustled my jimmies a bit.)

This is extremely common in dev circles, it's an area where we're completely detached from average users. Just to make the point, here is the mozilla hardware survey that shows >50% of users having 4GB or less: https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/ .

If we look at the more technical users on steam (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey) then only ~15% of users have 4GB or less, along with 40% having 8GB.

There's a good reason macbooks top out at 16GB.

Ah, found it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16735354

>Firefox is eating 750 MB just keeping this single tab open while I type this.

I have 127 tabs open on Firefox Quantum 61.0.1 (64 bit). It uses ~ 1100 MB spread among 7 processes. I have 6 addons enabled (Decentraleyes, Firefox pioneer, I don't care about cookies, Tab counter, Tree style tab and uMatrix).

I run Linux and StumpWM on my desktop, and recently I had upgrade to 12GB of RAM, because it turns out 8GB is very easy to exhaust these days. I currently have 9.3GB tied up, mostly by browser processes.

But I don't run any Electron apps, so there's that.

But, yeah, I guess I wouldn't be able to run this same workload with 4GB RAM. That's what lubuntu is for.

OTOH, try starting a modern full blown distro on something like an rpi instead of raspian and you will quickly discover that you _NEED_ more than 4G of ram and a lot of CPU just to start firefox. Its even worse if you don't have hardware GL acceleration.

OTOH, the lightweight desktops (lxqt, lxdt, xfce) really are..

SolidWorks? CATIA? Matlab?

Should say that KRDC is a good RD connection manager, but it's KDE only unless you wanna install a third of it.

Premier or Final cut don't but DaVinci Resolve and Lightworks do.

Obviously if your workflow and thus your livelihood depends on a particular tool you should run a platform that runs it but I would question why someone with money would pick windows over mac.

As highlighted, some take it way too far by trying to extract 'maximum value' which ends up being counterproductive.

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

That said, I would be willing to bite the bullet and accept speed limits across the board if it resulted in lean web.

Runs on a RPi under my TV and I stay well below my 300MB data cap, while consuming dozens of news sources.

I started with the basics BBC, NYT, Guardian, The Intercept for general news, The Conversation for science news without sensationalism, and some tech blogs. Then I just read most of it, and follow some links to find new sources. Most of the times news start with "As reported by X", or just a link, so you can discover new sources like that.

You can also browse HN (and n-gate for the highlights) and Reddit to discover new sources.

If you add so much you can't keep up, remove some, or change the feeds into section feeds. Most online newspapers provide them. I miss Yahoo Pipes, and have yet to find a simple hosted alternative. There is also RSS Bridge for sites without feeds (Twitter, Facebook), but I still haven't found the time to set it up.

You can also add paywalled sources to read the headlines only. You can mark them as read from the index.

That was during the mid and late 90s.

Browsing the web where you need to wait 3-10 seconds for everything to load is not a good user experience. It's a colossal waste of time, and today we have so many more reasons to view more pages compared to back then.

We should strive for an improvement instead of trying to stick with limitations from 20 years ago.

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

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

Im a lone owner of a website. I have enough time to accomplish one of 3 things before January

>Finish my Finance App

>update 200 pages to have pictures load based on screen type so you can load in 3 seconds instead of 6.

>Collect and compile data to create 20 more pages, all of which my 3000 subscribers actually come to my page for.

Very quickly you can see why an extra 2 seconds of loading time is not on our mind. Its important to allocate resources effectively, changing my website to load faster is limited value added vs creating content that my users actually want.

I understand. I'm also a sole owner of a website where I'm selling a product (video courses for software developers).

My priorities are to give as much value as possible for free and also sell some courses if I can.

According to Google's network tab the DOMContentLoaded time is about 250ms to load any page on my site (which are typically 1,000 to 5,000 word blog posts with some images). From the user's POV, the page loads pretty much instantly. Then about a second later Google Analytics and a social sharing widget pop up, but those happen after the content.

The interesting thing is I really didn't try hard to make this happen. I just stuck to server rendered templates and compressed my assets. I also made an effort to avoid heavy front end libraries and only add javascript / CSS when I needed to. I basically run a heavily modified theme based on Bootstrap with a couple of third party javascript libs (including jquery).

There's a lot of room for improvement but I haven't bothered because it seems good enough. It's very possible to get the perceived load speed of a page to be under 1 second without dedicating a lot of time to it.

What on earth do people do to get over 1 second load time? Remember that you have to actively spend time to bloat a site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if the fonts were there in the first place?

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

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

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

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

In that solution all of the tracking and analytics, fonts, and other 'baseline' content are part of the app, which then fetches the unique content (the few Kb of story text and Mb of images) and then renders it all locally. There is even some ability to do A/B testing in that setup.

The "App" itself is basically a browser with none of the non-content UI controls that browsers normally have, that can only go to a specific URL (the content supplier).

As a matter of fact, may be these API for tracking, analytics should be the same across Apps and Browsers.

We tech nerds keeps throwing out new terms, Web App, Web Pages, etc, but to our user they are all the same. They want to consumer information in Text, Video and Images, and in a fast and smooth way without Jank.

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

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

What you're missing is that advertising rates for television and print are several decimal orders higher than the rates for internet advertising. Why that is is more complicated than you might guess, but the economics of "printing" a newspaper by sending you the text is a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper than running a printing press. Between those two realities a lot of news web sites are being crushed.

[0] https://www.nytco.com/the-times-sees-circulation-growth-in-f...

[1] https://www.buysellads.com/buy/leaderboard/id/17/soldout/1/c...

thank you

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's precisely why many of us use (and promote the use of) adblockers and filtering extensions.

Statista claims 2.3 million digital subscribers. NYT is trying to milk that 2.3M for everything they got, squeeze the last drops of blood from the stone while they still can.

That's a great way to go out of business, when 99.97% of the world population is not your customer and your squeezing labors are not going to encourage them to sign up.

If you hyperoptimize to squeeze every drop out of a small customer base, eventually you end up with something like legacy TV networks where 99% of the population won't watch a show even for free, and the tighter the target focus on an ever shrinking legacy audience, the smaller the audience gets, until the whole house of cards collapses.

Its similar to the slice of pie argument; there are many business strategies that make a pie slice "better" at the price of shrinking it, and eventually the paper-thin slice disappears from the market because the enormous number of the employees can't eat anymore, but that certainly will be the most hyperoptimized slice of pie ever made, right before it entirely disappears.

NYT is going to have a truly amazing spy product right before it closes.

Many reasons, one of which you said. What would the price tag be for them to admit all they are tracking?

You misunderstood me. I mean, what would they like you to pay them, for them to be 100% transparent about what they're doing for tracking, what their advertisers are doing and who they are, and possibly stopping all that entirely. Ie, what is it worth to them.

In contrast if you never sign up, disable JS, and periodically clear your cookies, then the entire site works fine and none of the third party trackers work. At best they can link your browser user agent and IP to a hit on the server side.

The idea that tracking is purely or primarily there to support a business model of selling user data is a strawman invented by self-righteous HNers. You need to know what parts of your product are effective to make it competitive in today’s marketplace.

> The idea that tracking is purely or primarily there to support a business model of selling user data

Purely, no. Primarily? You can bet your sweet ass.

Like I said, serve me an ad. I'm not an idealist, I understand why advertising exists. But don't justify collecting data about which articles I read to serve to some inscrutable network of advertisers by saying that it has to be this way. We don't need this version of advertising.

Majority, not all. Why should they leave money on the table, exactly?

Most companies are not achieving the platonic maximalization of profit or shareholder value. They leave money on the table for a variety of reasons. It's not beyond the pale that this would be one of them. If you don't agree, then frankly it's probably an axiomatic disagreement and I don't think we can reason one another to a synthesis.

You've just described the status quo, where businesses have to sacrifice their lifeblood to achieve your ideals. Those businesses tend to be beaten by more focused competitors, which results in the industry you see today, filled with winners that don't achieve your ideals.

But good luck trying to champion an efficient web industry by essentially moralizing.

But more to the point, you're presenting an argument which implies the NYT is a business which will be beaten by its competitors if it doesn't track users through their unrelated web history. I don't think that kind of tracking is an existential necessity for the NYT. It's not their core competency. Their core competency is journalism - if they are beaten by a competitor it won't be because the competitor has superior tracking, for several reasons:

1. Journalism is not a winner take all environment,

2. Newspapers were surviving in online media well before this tracking was around,

3. The NYT already has sufficiently many inefficiencies that if they actually cared about user privacy, they could trim the fat elsewhere so they wouldn't have to know to within 0.001% precision whether or not a user will read an entire article just to be profitable.

I really don't think this is too idealistic. It's not like I'm saying they need to abandon advertising altogether. I don't even have a problem with the majority of advertising. It's the poor quality control and data collection that I take issue with. All I'm saying is that they don't need to do what they're doing to be profitable.

So? I'm not sure how this means that news orgs won't suffer from losing business to competitors with superior tracking.

> Newspapers were surviving in online media well before this tracking was around

Markets change. Advertisers have different expectations. Readers have more news to choose from. This is a silly argument.

> The NYT already has sufficiently many inefficiencies that if they actually cared about user privacy, they could trim the fat elsewhere

Sure, but why? Why would they do that? Why wouldn't they trim the fat elsewhere AND keep the tracking to make more money?

The point you make doesn't really make sense. Yeah, it's theoretically possible for news orgs to stop tracking in the same way that it's theoretically possible for me to take out a knife right now and cut off my legs. News orgs can make up their losses elsewhere and survive in the same way that I can still get around with a wheelchair.

But why on earth would I or the NYT do that?

I respond to you with these questions because it seems to me that both you and the OP speak out against these practices because you feel they are unnecessary. My point is that they are necessary. You just don't acknowledge the forces that make them so.

It may be that they are, in fact, driving users away. Tracking user behaviour can become a distraction.

While it may give some insight does it give anything of meaning to know most people skim into the first few paragraphs before clicking away? Does it improve the writing quality or fact checking? Is it worth the risk of alienating customers over? To give a deliberately extreme and absurd example Victoria's Secret could hire people to stalk their customers to find out more about product failure conditions in the field but that would be a horrifying and stupid idea.

"Everybody is doing it." is a poor rationale for implementing a business practice.

They can't do UX anaylsis, nothing.

For the second, I never got explained to me how UX analysis really works for news sites. Isn't it enough to put 2 or 3 people in a room and show them a few variations of the UI? There isn't really much to publishing text, images, and a few graphs. Graphs are a very well explored field, I don't think you can learn more about them by just watching hot maps and click through rates.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

However the result will usually be a lot of dark patterns. For instance, that's why you get popup to ask you to register.

You'd expect ux to be a small unit, but that includes everyone who works on revenue-generating ads. Moving one tiny thing has a direct impact on revenue, which affects every person employed by nyt.

And it could easily be enough. Having 1/3 of a quantity of something doesn't mean you barely had enough before.

What happens when the proxy goes down? What happens when there are bugs? Do you think publishers can really trust advertisers to be good stewards of the publisher's business? Think for a moment about publishers that are not as big as the NYT.

Okay, maybe they do trust an advertiser-controlled proxy server. This means that both tracking scripts and NYT scripts are served from the same domain, meaning they no longer have cross origin security tampering protection. What's stopping the NYT from serving a script that tampers with an advertiser's tracking script?

They can use a trusted third party to run the proxy and use industry standards/SLAs for site reliability/uptime. And they can still use different subdomains with no obvious pattern (web1.nytimes.com vs web2.nytimes.com -- which is the ad server?) or audit the scripts sent through the proxy for malice.

- It externalizes resource usage - the waste happens on users' machines. Who cares that it adds up to meaningful electricity consumption anyway?

- It makes it easier for marketing people and developers to independently work on the site. Developers can optimize, marketers can waste all that effort by including yet another third-party JS.

- It supports ad auctions and other services in the whole adtech economy.

- You don't have to do much analytics yourself, as the third party provides cute graphs ideal for presenting to management.

The open source version has been renamed "Revive Adserver", and it looks maintained, but I don't think it's used nearly as much as the openx [open source version] of old.

If you use Revive Adserver or you design a server-local ad system in-house, it won't be as sophisticated as gigantic ad-providers who can do all sorts of segmentation and analysis (producing pretty reports which execs and stakeholders love even if that knowledge adds no value to the business).

They could, but that would require paying people and firms like Nielsen to gather data. Instead they engage in the same freeloading that the industry derides users for.

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

Not that that is the case.

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

> NYT employs 1,300 people

Totally irrelevant. Why should the number of employees in the company have any bearing on the size or cost of the product? Ford has 5x as many employees as Tesla. Should their cars be 5x as big or 5x more expensive?

> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product

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

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

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

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

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

If the cost or the size wasn't a constraint, for sure Ford would build a car 5x as big or 5x as expensive.

The website size isn't a constraint here, if it was, they would works on it and make it smaller. It's only a constraint for highly technical people here. Currently at my job I'm optimizing some queries that takes way too long. It has been like that for years but we hit a wall recently, our SQL Server can't take it anymore. I always found it stupid that it took so long to optimize it... but at the end of the day, the clients just didn't care that it took 3 seconds to load the page. I could be working on more features right now, something that the client actually care about.

What makes the number of employees relevant to the size? Well if you were the only one building that website, you would know everything about it right? You would always use the exact same component, reuse everything you can, you already know every single part of the code. Add a second employee, now you don't know exactly what he does, you do know some of it but some time you forget and you may duplicate something or do it badly or whatever. At one point, something is just too big to be understood by a any single employee and you get code badly reused, stuff that serve no direct purpose too but make maintenance easier, etc... You never decrease the size simply because it's never worth it to but each and every single one of the employee add stuff to it.

This is a bad example. Tesla is a failing/failed car company that cant produce 200k cars per year. Ford has their truck program that sells that in a few months.

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

Comparing a book vs a timely article is unfair. NYT produces content daily to encourage shares and people clicking on various links on the website. Links, Images, Videos, comments, etc... None of those are available in dumb text.

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

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

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

If the NYT cut their paper down to just the style section, horoscopes, and other garbage, they would be just another Buzzfeed and are probably not equipped to compete.

On the other hand, Info Wars, Mother Jones and friends offer publications with basically no journalism at all. That's the space the NYT, WSJ, Miami Herland, Chicago Tribune, and so on fill. They do Pulitzer prize worthy reporting. If these papers become run-of-the-mill click farms, I'm sure silicon valley will run them out of business, as rage bait is not really their core competency.

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

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

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

We understood the horror no less than we do now. Javascript in the 90s gave us infinite pop-ups, pop-unders, evasive controls, drive-by downloads and otherwise hijacked your browser and/or computer. There's a reason Proxomitron and other content blockers hit the scene by the early 2000s-- the need to shut that shit off was clear.

There was no youtube, wikipedia, itunes or reddit. No instagram, twitter or google earth. The internet was basically geocities where most webpages were fan pages or pages/forums about niche interests.

I think people want to believe that because they believe that if ads were to disappear off the internet tomorrow, nothing would change. They don't realize that ads subsidize the content they consume, whether it's a youtube video they're watching or a reddit thread, ads are paying for that content. Nothing is free.

I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. You cannot say what the web was intended to be because you had no hand in inventing it. You do not know the mind of Tim Berners-Lee.

In fact, I argue the opposite - he had a vision of a global hyperlinked information system. While he wanted the protocol itself to be free (a move away from gopher), the information itself had no such protections. And that is precisely what we have today; it doesn't cost anything to use the WWW protocol. His vision has been fulfilled.

Now, the information (the content) itself is another matter. IP laws exist for a reason, people want to be paid for the content they create. They have ownership of that content. Whether it's the latest episode of game of thrones, a video game IP, or a book I wrote, the law protects my intellectual property. If I want to charge for access to that content, I'm more than within my legal right. Whether it's accessed over WWW, a cable box, or purchased from a book store, it makes no difference to my legal protections.

I think it's quite possible to know what TBL thinks about privacy-invasive javascript, given that he's very much alive and writing about such things to this day.

https://webfoundation.org/2017/03/web-turns-28-letter/

The app platform would consume the document platform because it is easier to enforce DRM requirements in an app platform than in a document platform.

I'm just thankful that I can still Print to PDF nearly anything. I don't think it will last much longer though because "web" "designers" are driven to destroy anything and everything that was actually good about the web in their quest to monetize every pixel on my screen.

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

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

[citation needed]

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

See 2 in the article. A sample:

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

I work for one of the vacation rentals

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

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

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

Anything sufficiently magical to the layman will instill blind allegiance

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

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

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

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

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

But that's really all it is, a web server (or an app, or an extension, or a combo) that serves you up the web looking like Craigslist. Would require strongly curated set of "fronts"/"recipes".

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

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

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

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

The problem with those kinds of environments (where everything is editable at runtime using highly expressive langiages) is they assume everyone is a power user and there are no malevolant actors trying to mess up your machine. That’s not what the modern landscape is like.

things get more locked down as we develop abstractions that we have more control over

Anyway, there was a certain barrier for entry so there were less users and messages. But some really good experts posted there. And some really fun jokers.

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

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

   du -h 1.htm

   206K

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither do I. For some websites, this is both necessary and appropriate.

However, in cases where the user does not want/need these resources, or where she does not trust the provider, I do not think there is anything wrong with not downloading images, stylesheets, unnecessary scripts, fonts, spyware, advertisements, etc.

cnn.com fails miserably without JS.

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

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

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

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

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

Now of course, I'm running an ad blocker. I assume the remaining MB that you noticed had come from advertising sources. In which case, bloat isn't the issue, ads are.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/politics/facebook-poli...

You really can't beat savings like that.

It's a ridiculous apples-and-hammers comparison thinly veiled as an intelligent critique.

Also, browsers have good enough typography by default, which can be controlled with CSS.

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

Also, is a world where he NYT is subscriber only really preferable?

I think you invite the “false dichotomy” by making the comparison between plain text Moby Dick and the front page of one of the most successful newspapers in the world in 2018. I agree with many of your points but find the way you make your argument to be full of comparisons of apples and oranges while avoiding proposing any kind of solution.

Examples would be the same publications 10 or 20 years ago. They weren't exactly plain text but they were a lot lighter and the content has not improved measurably in that time.

Here's one from the 70's that's still going: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

Minitel isn't a publication? I'm familiar with Minitel, I've read a book on it, but I don't know what you're trying to insinuate by linking it here in a discussion about publishing.

Also, "still going strong?" Minitel was discontinued, in 2012. Because France has the modern internet now.

I don’t have any great ideas myself, but part of me sees the Americans with Disabilities Act as a model for getting this done.

I really don’t like AMP because of the Google Cache and the potential for google to bias their search results page to emphasize AMP pages over similarly performing non AMP pages, but it’s a better thought out attempt to fix “the Bullshit Web” than anything else I’ve seen, and it has been extremely successful in decreasing payload size for many readers of sites like NYT and other major publishers.

People are most familiar with realtime broadcast audio and video, however I could see something like newsgroups working via a broadcast medium.

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

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

I agree on those complexity graphs since they're actually scanned from Sean Carroll's book and edited in Pixelmator - if I was better with graphics I could probably recreate them as SVG or in an editor and make it only a couple kb.

Same for the MinutePhysics screen grab, though I couldn't bring myself to attempt a poor recreation of their work and couldn't get rid of the weird pink gradient background which probably prevents better compression.

The Youtube cover images are still being pulled in from youtube - I debated downloading/compressing/hosting them myself, but figured I'd gain more from downloading them from the separate domain since I still think there is a default limit of connections the browser will open to a single domain at the same time.

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

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

How many times did you read moby dick online.

I feel like there's something I'm missing here: something like getting his hands on clever usernames?

Audiovisual media has value.

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

Audiovisual media in and of itself has no value.

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

But how many Mona Lisas are this?

1) that a website's value is the number of words on the page, and

2) that raw text is the highest value data that can be transmitted over the internet, and

3) that inefficiency and wastefulness of bits is a bad thing

First off, you need to defend your first two assumptions. Don't websites do a lot more than display text? Does HTML/markup not have a magnitude more value than raw text? And how exactly is being inefficient with something that is abundant a tautologically bad thing?

When it comes to bits, abundant to who? Those who can afford said abundance? Certainly not to those with bandwidth caps and slow internet access.

Reminds me of a cartoon I saw once: "What if climate change turns out to be a hoax and we end up making the world better for nothing!"

Since when is doing something efficiently and non-wastefully not a good idea for its own sake?

  Since when is doing something efficiently and non-wastefully not a good idea for its own sake?

Do not denigrate the modern web in the name of efficiency when your measure for evaluating websites is wrong and you incorrectly assume that the difference between a 1mb and 10mb payload matters to the actual operation of the site and visitor satisfaction.

Re: That comic you once saw.

Yeah, what if we shut down all coal power plants and make the earth better? Oh wait, now we have destroyed our critical infrastructure and our government/nation has absolutely no leverage to even make decisions regarding the environment. If people would stop dumbing down these complex problems, it would be a good thing.

Not to mention, my reply is to parent comment, not to the article in general. In no way did I say I completely agree with the author of the article- that's not what my comment was about.

However, if a news article with a load of JS and ads is considered to be this "modern web" then good riddance to it. I hope it goes away.

Yes, cool things can be done with the web, and some of those cool things take a lot of bandwidth or payload to accomplish- the examples (news sites, etc) are not these things.

What are your reasons for thinking the modern web is terrific? I agreed with that statement when I saw it, but as I think about it, I'm not so sure I do

When the effort to optimize something would be better spent elsewhere.

On the web there are two important points. First, bandwidth isn't always abundant so optimising is worthwhile, and secondly optimising is effectively a negative cost if you just don't include wasteful features in the first place - building optimally is less effort than building wastefully.

> Don't websites do a lot more than display text?

Yes, evidently, but the author doesn't disagree with this. In fact, the entire premise of the article is that websites do a bunch of useless stuff that have nothing to do with delivering the content you are browsing them for.

> Does HTML/markup not have a magnitude more value than raw text?

As a universal rule there is of course no answer to this. There is a lot of absolutely worthless text on the web. Given the example, though, would you say that the markup is worth more than the text on a website whose primary attraction is written articles? Do you frequently visit websites just to admire their markup?

> And how exactly is being inefficient with something that is abundant a tautologically bad thing?

My time is limited. RAM is limited, CPU time is limited. My mobile data plan is limited. No one is happy with a page loading for 10 seconds for something which should take 1/10000 of that. That's not to say that this is tautologically a bad thing. The author explains why he thinks its bad and I think that people that value their time and resources should agree. If you think that an article loading for 10 seconds is a bad thing, it's bad that an article takes 10 seconds to load. It only becomes tautological once you apply your value system to it, if ever.

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

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

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

2. Fair enough

3. Referencing "increasing the entropy in the universe" isn't a good argument because the amount of entropy increase due to humans is much, much less than how much entropy is increased by particles being blasted out of all the stars in the universe (unless I fundamentally misunderstand what entropy is). I think that stars blasting out particles is a much larger contributor to entropy than humans not using computer bits effectively.

And also what does entropy as a concept have to do with anything, anyway? Why should human engineering tasks have such considerations? If being super efficient with an abundant resource has a large cost (of some sort), but low efficiency has no business- or environmental- downside, then why be efficient with it?

In your last bit you argue that it's acceptable to send a site that is bigger than even the most bloated HTML/CSS page; I don't think that's true for any site/app that wants to be fast. It slows you down and people notice and stop using your service unless it's required of them.

I think that in general things are not as bad as you make them out to be, and your arguments have some merit but are mostly revealed as nonsense when the rubber hits the road. Universe entropy is completely unrelated to modern software engineering and web sites that have a lot of devs and are not SalesForce are not _that_ bloated.

But it has. Data transfer and processing isn't free. It works on electricity. You may think that a difference between 10KB (efficient) and 10MB (current web) is meaningless because resources are abundant, and it let you save couple hours of dev time[0] - but consider that this difference is per user, and you saved a couple hours for yourself by making thousands[1] of people waste three orders of magnitude more electricity that they would if you were a bit more caring.

Like plastic trash and inefficient cars, this stuff adds up.

--

[0] - Such savings on larger pages take obviously much more work, but then this time gets amortized over all the use the website has - so the argument still holds.

[1] - Millions, for large sites.

Yeah, they actually waste more in this case. The base cost is that of processing of content, which is linear with size (on a category level; parsing JS may have a different constant factor than displaying an image). But in the typical makeup of a website, just how much stuff can be in the 10KB case? Content + some image + a bit of CSS and maybe a JS tracker. In the 10MB case, you have tons of JS code, a lot of which will keep running in the background. This incurs continuous CPU cost.

> and people don't just flip the power switch as soon as a page load finishes

CPUs have power-saving modes, power supplies can vary their power draw too.

Or, for those with whom such abstract terms as "wastefulness" don't resonate, let me put it in other words: if you ever wondered why your laptop and your smartphone drains its battery so quickly, this is why. All the accumulated software bloat, both web and desktop, is why.

As previously noted, if you don't find that waste is fundamentally wrong on a moral level, there's no point forward from here. I view myself on a planet of dwindling resources, vanishing biodiversity, and warming at increasing rates.

If you think the energy that goes into computation is free or lacking external environmental downstream effects, then at the root of it, you carelessly shit where you eat and I don't. That's a fundamental disagreement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_protocol

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

I would argue that arguing over how big our websites are is not the important factor. I submit to you that PC electricity usage is the most relevant quantity we need to discuss when it comes to consumption of bits. I argue that the increased load on the network of sending more bits is negligible compared to the many endusers and their PCs that consume our data.

If we agree that PC electricity consumption is the most important thing to address, then we must ask whether or not the electricity generation process is bad for the environment. Most likely, electricity is generated by hydroelectric dams or coal/combustibles power plants. Suppose we replace those two types of power generation with low-maintenance, 50-year-lifetime solar panels (for which the tech exists). Can you still argue that the increased amount of bits sent over the wire for heavy modern websites is an environmental negative that we should address? I would say, no, at this point we have reduced the environmental impact of most electricity-consuming devices, and we can ignore PCs for the time being.

Therefore it is not the personal computer and the quantity of bits it consumes that should be your focus. It should be electricity generation.

I would like to ask you to consider whether or not your compassion-based arguments contain any resentment. Are you acting and speaking entirely on the grounds of compassion? And if so, how can you be sure that your supposed actions are going to reduce suffering of people and the planet and not have the opposite effect? How can you suggest solutions, like decreasing the weight of websites, and know with a high degree of certainty that it will produce the desired outcome (environmental preservation)? Could it have an unintended consequence?

But let me put it this way, I still reduce, reuse, and recycle even though I know that one unconscientous suburban family will essentially dwarf my lifelong efforts in a year of their average living.

I know that those efforts are futile for the end goal of environmental conservation. That doesn't mean that I'm going to stop doing them. Being dedicated to acting in accordance with an understanding of first principles is not a bad thing, even if those actions are relatively impotent or ineffectual in and of themselves in the current moment.

As far as changing out power sources to nominally sustainable forms, yes, I would still find issue with people wasting those resources, just as I would find issue with people running air conditioners with the windows open.

As far as compassion and unintended consequences, everyone might be here for a reason and maybe trashing the planet is part of that plan, but equally so I might be here to speak against trashing the planet as a part of said reason and said plan.

It boils down again to if you need to find a reason to justify minimizing unnecessary energy usage, we're not going to see eye to eye and I doubt any argument will sway either of us towards the other's camp. Chalk it up to different contexts.

I believe that care for the environment and design that puts being green first is going to have its time in web design. I also believe that along with document structure, accessibility and 'don't make me think' UX that eco-friendliness is going to become a core design principle in a lot of the web. If you put this stuff first then you can have a website that is pretty close to the plaintext ideal. This can be layered on with progressive web app 'no network' functionality and other progressive enhancements, e.g. CSS then JS, with the content working without either of these add-ons.

We all know that you have to minimise your scripts and mash them all into some big ball of goo, we all know that images that are too big aren't going to download quickly. But the focus is on 'site speed' rather than being green. In fact no developer I have ever met has mentioned 'being green' as a reason to cut down on the bloat and existing thinking on 'going green' consists of having wind turbines rather than dinosaur farts powering the data centre. Cutting down the megabytes to go green is kind of crazy talk.

A lot of this thinking is a bit like compacting your rubbish before putting it put for the bin men. Really we would do best to not do the rigmarole of compacting the trash and just having less of it to start with, ideally with more of it re-used or put out for recycling.

We saw what cheap gasoline did to the U.S. auto industry. For decades the big three added on more and more inches to bonnets (hoods) and boots (trunks) with very big V8 engines a standard feature. Until 1973 came along there was no incentive to do otherwise. Who would have thought to have cut down on the fuel consumption?

Outside of America, in the land of the rising sun they did not have a lot of oil. Every gallon they bought had to be bought in U.S. Dollars and so those U.S. Dollars had to be earned first. Europe faced the same problem so economy was of importance in a lot of the world outside America. The four cylinder engines powering cars in Europe and Japan became vastly more efficient than U.S. V8 monster engines. Not only that but cars with a four cylinder engine did not have to weigh many metric tonnes. Nowadays the big three can only really make trucks and truck based SUVs that are protected with the Chicken Tax. Nobody in America is buying U.S. made small cars, U.S. made luxury sedans or even U.S. made 'exotic' sportscars. Economy and 'being green' is not a big deal to U.S. car buyers, nonetheless the lack of having efficiency and economy as a core part of the design ethos has led to a domestic industry that has lost to the innovators in the rest of the world that did put these things central to what they do.

We haven't had 1973 yet and the web pages of today are those hideous Cadillac things with the big fins on them and boots big enough to smuggle extended families across the border with. AMP pages are a bit like those early 'Datsun' efforts that fell short in many ways. But I think that the time of efficient web pages is coming.

The Japanese also developed The Toyota Way with things like Just in Time and a careful keeping tabs on waste. Quality circles also were part of this new world of manufacturing ethos.

The old ways of making stuff didn't really give the results the Japanese were getting but exchange rates, Japanese people willing to work for nothing and other non-sequiturs distracted people from what was going on and how the miracles were achieved. The Germans and the Japanese built great engineering 'platforms' and then got some great styling for the bodywork from the legendary Italian design studios to package it all together. Meanwhile, in the USA there were more fins, more chrome bullets on the grille and more velour in the interiors.

So with the web it isn't just the Lotus 'just add lightness' that is going to be coming along to kill the bloat. It is also ways of working. For a long time the industry has been doing design with lorem ipsum, static PDF mockups and then handing this to some developers with the client expecting not a pixel to differ from the mockups, regardless of whether any of it made any sense. So we have got stuck with the same carousels on the same homepages - the tailfins of the web.

Although it is 'industry standard' to work certain ways, e.g. the big up front design by someone who can't really read, the project manager who can't do HTML, the agile design process that means nobody knows what they are doing, something has to change. Content driven, iterative improvements and much else we forgot from the 'Toyota Way' will ultimately win out with things like being green actually being important.

As for the article, the 'bulls4it web' and David Graeber's ideas as applied to web bloat is an excellent contribution to what web developers should be thinking about.

On the other hand, bloated slow websites only serve the needs of their authors, while annoying all their users. Users aren't asking for more tracking, ads, or any of that other bullshit.

(Full disclosure: I'm a big fan of vintage "Detroit Iron". You really have to ride in one to understand the experience.)

The bloat actually serves a lot of people, directly or indirectly. It is like packaging, everyone complains about packaging and plastic but when you are in the supermarket do you take that box that is already opened or that tin with the dent?

There are lots of stakeholders behind the bloat. Including the bullshit jobs people of the online world, e.g. the SEO people, the people in marketing and the programmers. In my opinion the cookie-cutter way of churning out websites is being done by a lot of people that are barking up the wrong tree on how to do it with knowledge of modern web technologies rarely gained. Buried in what you see is a bundle of reset scripts, IE6 polyfills and other stuff that nobody dares to touch as it has been there since 2009 and nobody knows what it does, within the company that wrote the CMS or in the agency that adds the 'theme'. It is worrying really with the best people can do is to add layers of ever more complex 'build' tools to mash this cruft into something they don't have to think about.

P.S. There is no way I would be in an econobox if travelling through the American West, give me one of your trucks, SUVs or even a sedan any day. In Europe though, tables are turned, a country lane or a city stranded in a U.S. vehicle would be a special kind of hell.

As far as photojournalism goes, I can think of thousands of reasons why the predominance of photojournalism has been pernicious to civil society. The strategic use of the identifiable victim effect in atrocity propaganda being the most obvious.

However, with that said, I'm not arguing that visual media is entirely unnecessary, but rather against the idea that every user needs to download a 1680x1050 image when a default 600px width image or even the horror of having the image as an external link would be more than adequate for the overwhelming majority of users, particularly those in rural and developing areas that can't afford to waste their total allotment of monthly mobile data on "What Chance the Rapper’s Purchase of Chicagoist Means".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda

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

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/opinion/culture/chance-th...