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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 a

• zajd 8y ago
  > They need data to produce the product [citation needed] There's no reason they need to use Javascript to track user behavior down to "how long have they read this article".
• throwawaymath 8y ago
  > 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.
  • koolba 8y ago
    Interestingly if you pay them, and thus are logged in when you view an article, then they can better track you. 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.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • closeparen 8y ago
    NYT needs to produce and recommend content that people find engaging to continue earning their subscription dollars. 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.
    • bumholio 8y ago
      90% of that can be accomplished with server-side stats. Do you really need to track mouse movements and follow readers with super-cookies across the web to find out what articles people find engaging on your site? > 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.
      • chickenfries 8y ago
        I agree in general but there are some things which I don’t see going away any time soon that publishers need. Online advertisers want to know that their ads are being viewed by a human and not a bot, and that they were on screen for long enough and that the user didn’t just scroll past. Publishers want to know how far down you make it in their article, so they know where to put the ads in the body of the article.
    • 8y ago
• paulsutter 8y ago
  You’re right about the problem: web pages tend to scale with the size of the organization serving them, not the size of the content. But this is the failure, not a defense. It’s a big problem on mobile and the reason I read HN comments before the article. > NYT employs 1,300 people
  • soared 8y ago
    Definitely a good point. You'd imagine they'd have at least 1 person who optimizes the site for page size / load speed.
    • mr_toad 8y ago
      And 100 other people who’s job it is to cram more features in.
• mvdwoord 8y ago
  They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough). 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.
• cheezymoogle 8y ago
  A random archive of the New York Times frontpage in 2005 is 300kb. Articles were probably comparable in size. 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?
  • kazagistar 8y ago
    I mean, if most of that is a few images, then those images could just be bigger today for nicer screens and faster internet. Not that that is the case.
• goatlover 8y ago
  > 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). 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.
  • jstarfish 8y ago
    > I can imagine the horror people in the 90s would have experienced if they new what JS was going to be used for 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.
    • mahranch 8y ago
      Yeah, people under 33 seem to have a romanticized view of the internet. They believed there was no ads and it was flush with the kinds of content we enjoy today. Nope. Content existed but it was scarce/thin. Many of the internet users just stayed on AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve and never left to explore the WWW side of things. Those service providers were essentially national level BBSs. 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.
      • 8y ago
• kingbirdy 8y ago
  The New York Times existed for 145 years from its founding in 1851 to the creation of its website in 1996, and it got by just fine without tracking pixels in all those years.
  • freediver 8y ago
    This is a fallacy. Humans got by just fine without smartphones, Internet, electricity for thousands of years. While you could do just fine without those things today it is impractical. Times change (pun intended).
• jaredklewis 8y ago
  > 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). 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.
  • lazyasciiart 8y ago
    So, how does the NYT style section fit into your idea of 'actual journalism'?
    • jaredklewis 8y ago
      It doesn't. Not every word printed in the NYT is journalism, but it doesn't change the fact that they are one of the few websites that have any journalism at all. 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.
• ryandrake 8y ago
  > Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. 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.
  • dwild 8y ago
    > 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? 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.
• LolNoGenerics 8y ago
  > 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). 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.
• kdl20kxkrk 8y ago
  > NYT employs 1,300 people. 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
• Joeri 8y ago
  Newspapers did just fine for centuries without tracking. The business is viable without tracking.