4 ms·

Fancy site... too bad it takes 30 seconds to load. I almost jumped ship.

by EpicEng 10y ago

sp332 10y ago
For me, I could only read the first paragraph. No other text showed up. If I scrolled back up, the first paragraph was gone too.
- kodfodrasz 10y ago
  I experienced the same thing. Then after reopening the page the content showed up, but I was no longer interested in the content, only wanted to see the page source to see how can a page be so broken, and it was no longer broken. So if you are still interested in the content, you should try opening the page again. It may work.
  - AkirIkasu 10y ago
    The only solution that worked for me was to scroll down a page and reload.
lvoudour 10y ago
I didn't believe it so I timed it. Took 15s for me, which is still absurd given the fact that civ 5 takes about the same time to generate a new game. Fancy or not it's just a website. I'm not an expert on the subject (web dev) so could someone explain why more and more websites have significant load times when all they do is load a few images and text? Is it a server issue, a dev issue or a browser issue?(pretty sure it's not a bandwidth issue) On the subject, the whole concept reminds me of House of Leaves, only the later is definitely more weird
- munchbunny 10y ago
  Back in the day this would happen because somebody needed to load a whole Flash applet. Web 2.0 was supposed to take us away from that. I suspect the main reason people do it is because progressive loading has the potential to leave your page half-rendered, which looks bad. So you block the whole thing until you can present it in its entirety. But it's the web. We're used to pages half-loading, and we're used to starting to read text before everything has been loaded. The right way to fix that problem is to make your design more lean, not to stick everything behind a 15-30s loading spinner.
  - lvoudour 10y ago
    Since mobile browsing is so prevalent, you would expect websites to be more optimised for mobile cpus/bandwidth and therefore very fast on ethernet connected desktops. But more and more I find sites that take so much time to load I feel I'm back to dial-up days. This blog doesn't even have ads. It's absurd considering the fact we can stream full HD content in several devices on the same connection
    - throwanem 10y ago
      People develop on localhost or local servers, and don't think about what happens when the RTT exceeds a millisecond.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  There are many reasons that are understandable, such as most media companies having to use multiple trackers to squeeze as much money out of their inventory as possible (ad javascripts take most of the loading time). I think these are shitty but still understandable. But in this case, this is just a hipster website. The slow loading time is purely coming from the content. When NYT first did "Snowfall", people were trying to grasp onto anything that "might be the future of journalism", so that "rich format" took off for a while, but now people know better, these rich format articles have terrible ROI because creating them is really hard and not scalable, and in many cases it wastes a lot of traffic, and last and most importantly, readers couldn't care less about this "rich format" journalism. It's just the journalism people circle jerking about how "beautiful" it is. Which is why this format mostly disappeared. That said, I have never seen anything THIS bad. I am leaving all these comments here because I am genuinely annoyed that they messed up the reading experience on a topic I was actually interested in reading, so bad that I decided not to read it.

Fancy site... too bad it takes 30 seconds to load. I almost jumped ship.

by EpicEng 10y ago

Fancy site... too bad it takes 30 seconds to load. I almost jumped ship.

sp332 10y ago

For me, I could only read the first paragraph. No other text showed up. If I scrolled back up, the first paragraph was gone too.

kodfodrasz 10y ago
I experienced the same thing. Then after reopening the page the content showed up, but I was no longer interested in the content, only wanted to see the page source to see how can a page be so broken, and it was no longer broken. So if you are still interested in the content, you should try opening the page again. It may work.
- AkirIkasu 10y ago
  The only solution that worked for me was to scroll down a page and reload.

lvoudour 10y ago

I didn't believe it so I timed it. Took 15s for me, which is still absurd given the fact that civ 5 takes about the same time to generate a new game. Fancy or not it's just a website. I'm not an expert on the subject (web dev) so could someone explain why more and more websites have significant load times when all they do is load a few images and text? Is it a server issue, a dev issue or a browser issue?(pretty sure it's not a bandwidth issue) On the subject, the whole concept reminds me of House of Leaves, only the later is definitely more weird

munchbunny 10y ago
Back in the day this would happen because somebody needed to load a whole Flash applet. Web 2.0 was supposed to take us away from that. I suspect the main reason people do it is because progressive loading has the potential to leave your page half-rendered, which looks bad. So you block the whole thing until you can present it in its entirety. But it's the web. We're used to pages half-loading, and we're used to starting to read text before everything has been loaded. The right way to fix that problem is to make your design more lean, not to stick everything behind a 15-30s loading spinner.
- lvoudour 10y ago
  Since mobile browsing is so prevalent, you would expect websites to be more optimised for mobile cpus/bandwidth and therefore very fast on ethernet connected desktops. But more and more I find sites that take so much time to load I feel I'm back to dial-up days. This blog doesn't even have ads. It's absurd considering the fact we can stream full HD content in several devices on the same connection
  - throwanem 10y ago
    People develop on localhost or local servers, and don't think about what happens when the RTT exceeds a millisecond.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
There are many reasons that are understandable, such as most media companies having to use multiple trackers to squeeze as much money out of their inventory as possible (ad javascripts take most of the loading time). I think these are shitty but still understandable. But in this case, this is just a hipster website. The slow loading time is purely coming from the content. When NYT first did "Snowfall", people were trying to grasp onto anything that "might be the future of journalism", so that "rich format" took off for a while, but now people know better, these rich format articles have terrible ROI because creating them is really hard and not scalable, and in many cases it wastes a lot of traffic, and last and most importantly, readers couldn't care less about this "rich format" journalism. It's just the journalism people circle jerking about how "beautiful" it is. Which is why this format mostly disappeared. That said, I have never seen anything THIS bad. I am leaving all these comments here because I am genuinely annoyed that they messed up the reading experience on a topic I was actually interested in reading, so bad that I decided not to read it.