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Unpopular opinion alert: Maybe the "bullshit" is only bullshit to you, the thorny tech-savvy reader. Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and th

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.

peterwwillis 8y ago
They're not idiots, they just don't give a crap about waste until it affects their bottom line. (Most humans seem to operate on this principle) A lot of the business-related bullshit is a response to advertising and sales. But a lot is also lazy tech people slapping pieces together until it does a thing, and they don't care that it loads 100x more data than it needs to, because again, doesn't affect their bottom line. Traffic costs must be pretty low, or nobody's watching that line on the AWS budget, or the CDN is eating the cost.
- techbio 8y ago
  In a world where video over IP exists, market rate traffic expenses have got to be among the least of the concerns of print journalism.
- nrhk 8y ago
  Why would they care, they have to do the work of 5 in the time of one because there's now off the shelf solutions for everything. Too bad if those solutions often come bloated and incorrectly configured, maybe they should hire more engineers. Some business prioritize loading speeds but big ones with brand reputation won't care, they have little to lose.
  - komali2 8y ago
    Well then, shall we kick up more of a shit storm about it to give them a little more motivation? If the argument is "nobody will do anything about it because nobody cares," isn't the best response"then start caring!" I'll see if I can find some old articles I used to love about how something called something along the lines of "concerned Christians of America" basically determined what could be on television for ages because they maintained a letter-writing force of a mere five thousand people. Nobody else was kicking up that level of shit storm, so the networks listened to them.
  - matheusmoreira 8y ago
    > they have little to lose. Then let's make them lose. The more widespread bullshit blockers become, the more money they will lose.
SilasX 8y ago
I don't think you're wrong, but you may be overestimating how quickly they converge on an optimal balance, and what fraction of the bloat is necessary for business purposes. I frequently see sites that slow down my browser and mobile sites that become near unusable, and I doubt that is all necessary for making it pretty and having the right analytics. I've also frequently reviewed the work of front-end devs who just didn't see the easy optimizations they could make. The bloat persists until there's a clear relationship between some unit of bloat and some concrete loss, but that might not be easy to see, because you don't see the people who long since gave up on your site. Edit: One illustrative example is disability access accommodations. A lot of them are a net loss to the business, but some of them were obvious improvements no one had thought to do: "Oh, crap, it really does help to have a lip on the curb so you can roll stuff up!"
tannhaeuser 8y ago
Sounds like you work in the publishing business (and also that GP has tripped you up somehow). Care to elaborate what the rationale for publishers to bloat their web sites could possibly be? Because I know I've come to use news aggregators like HN as portal sites (plus RSS) rather than go to news sites directly for many years now, precisely because I want to know beforehand if a particular article is even worth visiting, rather than receive a crapton of script for nothing valuable in exchange.
isleyaardvark 8y ago
I'm sure plenty of sites improve their bottom line by implementing dark UX patterns as well, it doesn't make it any less bullshit.
isoprophlex 8y ago
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
- dgudkov 8y ago
  >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.
  - russdpale 8y ago
    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.
    - true_religion 8y ago
      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.
blub 8y ago
There are many logical reasons why various websites are so bloated. Certainly the market realities and web development culture play a role. That doesn't change the fact that the end result is bullshit, though. The tragedy of the commons is still a tragedy. I don't have a solution for commercial news organisations. If they can't completely subsidise their web presence through other means, it's pretty much guaranteed that the advertising pressures will turn it into crap.
- wuliwong 8y ago
  I don't understand how you are relating this to the tragedy of the commons other than saying that because something has a reason it doesn't preclude it from being something.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Everyone selfishly optimizing their bottomline ("let's earn a bit more by including extra JS analytics bullshit", "let's save some time on our end by making a million people waste a little bit of electricity every pageview") - each initially reaping some short-term benefits, but together ultimately turning the web into the shitshow it is today. That's textbook tragedy of the commons.
    - monadgonad 8y ago
      People’s/companies’ own websites aren’t commons. The protocols that make up the web itself haven’t degraded through use; this is no more a tragedy of the commons than if every shop in your town made you wait a few seconds before you could go inside.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        No, but the frameworks they use and services they outsource tasks to definitely are commons. Even more so are design and development trends.
        8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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phyzome 8y ago
It's still bullshit, because it doesn't help the visitor, and it only helps the company to the extent that they're in a Red Queen's Race—if no one else did it, they wouldn't have to either.
dictum 8y ago
I know I'm an idealist too, and my comment will be a display of hypocrisy: it seems that one of the rules for using the Internet is that you should completely forget about the is-ought problem. People will dole out all kinds of advice about technology, business, politics, society, relationships etc. by way of discussing something that only partially resembles reality (and assuming everyone or most people perceive things in the same way as themselves) (I'm guilty of that too.)
bumholio 8y ago
By the same token, maybe the automobile and oil industry really care a lot about the environment, but the only way to produce a safe, affordable and performing car is their tech savvy way refined for a century. Or maybe they just don't give a shit, and the current status quo allows them to make money without caring about the consequences, until we as an informed community demand a better way.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Sniffnoy 8y ago
The fact that people want bullshit or that bullshit sells does not change the fact that it is bullshit.
wuliwong 8y ago
I'm sure I am more consciously aware of the bloat but I do think that subconsciously "non-techy" people still dislike it. I feel like this is similar to the apple vs microsoft/IBM debates. I'm not even sure what the popular take on it is these days but I do believe that to some extent a pleasing user experience was/is championed by Apple (in a specific aesthetic sense). And, if apple never existed we would have less tech products with that user experience philosophy embedded in them. I believe that illusive "pleasing" user experience that apple seemed to try to build in its products is similar to the idea of not having as much bloat on websites. There is business value of consuming every single morsel of user tracking data possible but that tracking also has some cost in terms of user experience. Just because companies have tended towards bloat doesn't mean that they are definitely right. Apple has made a great deal of money and I believe some of that is due to their style of user experience.
rhizome 8y ago
"[B]usiness was improved" is doing a lot of work in there.
ryandrake 8y ago
The tons (and growing) of normal everyday users using ad blockers and other annoyance-reducing web plugins is evidence against this. Also, we are not talking about the expense of “micro-optimization.” We are talking about not deliberately spending the time to add all this BS into the software. I guarantee it costs less to publish a text/plain document than a HTML/CS/JavaScript trash fire.
Zimahl 8y ago
> 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. All i can say is that I work at a small-ish multi-million dollar business that got bought by a very large multi-billion dollar business. Our site has become very, very bloated due to everything that our parent corp wants in the name of 'making things better'. I'm not saying we are stagnant, but those changes really haven't increased our bottom line in any significant way. We now spend more time and dev resources supporting a site with much more 'bullshit'. Real business decisions, ones that benefited the customer, are where real increases in value were seen. This of course is anecdotal, but I've never really heard the opposite.
arkh 8y ago
> Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. You sure won't see those in your analytics dashboard.
GW150914 8y ago
You just used “maybe” eight times to make an argument without having to support it in the slightest. Maybe you’re right, or maybe you’re just bristling at an argument made well and strongly supported without a leg to stand on. Maybe if you bothered to support your claims, or even make them real claims instead of “maybes” it would be easier to take your non-arguments seriously. Of course it would also be easier to take you seriously if ad blockers and script managers and cookie sweepers weren’t so incredibly popular, along with VPNs. Every site begging people for money or to stop using an ad-blocker is a nail in your “point’s” coffin.
swsieber 8y ago
Or maybe it's really easy to have all the individual decisions make sense, but still arrive at a really insensible complete decision. Like a local maxima. It's easy to be smart, make smart decisions and end up somewhere dumb.
eadmund 8y ago
You make a good point: the people who have ruined the Web are doing it because it makes them a profit. That's the whole point of ethics & morality, though: refraining from what benefits us immediately because it's wrong. And just as it's wrong to kill the old lady next door to steal her house, it's wrong to turn a product-listing site into a JavaScript-laden monstrosity so terrible my phone becomes painfully hot to the touch.
vertexFarm 8y ago
I don't know, as much as I respect you looking out for the "engineer as savior" bias and the fact that average users may have a distinctly different viewpoint than we do, in this case it seems somewhat disingenuous. People have spoken time and again about needless auto-playing video clips. About weird, busted scroll hijacks and massive header images. About newsletter beggars which take up the whole screen on every. single. site. About ubiquitous "got it!" cookie disclaimers. About pages that load mountains of extraneous crap while you're trying to read, and reflows the text halfway through the second paragraph, suspiciously at the exact moment you try to tap a link which makes you click an ad instead, which is of course bloated with poison dogshit and offal and immediately crashes the tab. About how every single major site bullies you into downloading an app instead of putting effort into making their mobile site run properly. Instead the mobile site is intentionally crippled to incentivize the adtech-infected app even more, and even the request desktop mode is broken. And of course the mobile app is only a thinly-veiled plot to scrape your phone's guts out like a dead fish and gain every permission possible. If it can run in a browser, I think it should run in a browser. I'm highly suspicious of any app that is really just a website in a tarted-up trojan horse. Adblockers are perpetually on the rise, as the article says, and other content blockers and filters are also in play now. I have to use outline.com to read most news articles, which is an amazing resource. But I think this popular opinion is warranted. The internet is bloated with malicious bullshit. Everyone got in an arms race with each other and had to do it, despite nobody actually wanting it. I don't think the devs and designers who made this stuff so ubiquitous are evil, nor are they stupid. They were just caught in a catch-22 as web trends do their fickle thing. They are regular people earnestly doing their best, just like everyone else. Doomed to create camel after camel via feedback from ignorant clients, misread focus groups, neurotic middle management, et cetera. People rarely get to decide or unilaterally invent any of these large-scale trends, they just happen as a herd phenomenon I think. And everyone has to jump on board to remain viable, or at least that's the illusion at the time.
pauljonas 8y ago
No, it's herd mentality. Because it's what everyone else is doing, it's the standard, it's what you do and to be an outlier in this is to be deluged with how archaic you are and then be swarmed in marketing jargon that breaks down page element interactions to an atomic level. Meanwhile, users ditch the bloated web pages for apps or if browsing from a laptop or desktop computer, for a curated view delivered by Facebook or Twitter or another service in the long tail (i.e., Tumblr, Pinterest, etc.). The effect may not even be plainly noticeable but it does work on a psychological level. All the cruft and gunk dissuades repeat visits and any desire to return to browse that internet space. Some online spaces, and mostly in the news vein are even overtly abominable. My local news outlet (azcentral.com) is unbearable to load, with the autoplay video, the barrage of ads, both popovers and the hard elements that take space in display. Leaving just a tiny portion of the screen real estate to actual content that a reader might be interested in.
KaiserPro 8y ago
I used to work at the FT, and we tested a number of hypotheses: 1) faster page loads means better engagement 2) everyone hates popups. 3) everyone hates autoplay turns out that faster page loads _do_ make user happy, normal non tech savvy users happy. (source: http://engineroom.ft.com/2016/04/04/a-faster-ft-com/ http://engineroom.ft.com/2016/04/04/a-faster-ft-com/) I don't think the popup experiment has a write up, but people _hate_ popups, even more when they are not relevant. I was part of the auto play experiment, and whilst a few people really like them, it saves them clicking, the vast majority hate it with a passion. Auto play is a thing because it boosts ad impressions between 25-80% So for ad based revenue, yes, I can see why people do this. For subscribing sites, it kills your bottom line. So empirically they either rely too much on ads, or are idiots who don't have evidence to base decisions on.
furicane 8y ago
> Maybe other people making these decisions aren't idiots Nice joke, I liked it! :)

peterwwillis 8y ago

They're not idiots, they just don't give a crap about waste until it affects their bottom line. (Most humans seem to operate on this principle) A lot of the business-related bullshit is a response to advertising and sales. But a lot is also lazy tech people slapping pieces together until it does a thing, and they don't care that it loads 100x more data than it needs to, because again, doesn't affect their bottom line. Traffic costs must be pretty low, or nobody's watching that line on the AWS budget, or the CDN is eating the cost.

techbio 8y ago
In a world where video over IP exists, market rate traffic expenses have got to be among the least of the concerns of print journalism.
nrhk 8y ago
Why would they care, they have to do the work of 5 in the time of one because there's now off the shelf solutions for everything. Too bad if those solutions often come bloated and incorrectly configured, maybe they should hire more engineers. Some business prioritize loading speeds but big ones with brand reputation won't care, they have little to lose.
- komali2 8y ago
  Well then, shall we kick up more of a shit storm about it to give them a little more motivation? If the argument is "nobody will do anything about it because nobody cares," isn't the best response"then start caring!" I'll see if I can find some old articles I used to love about how something called something along the lines of "concerned Christians of America" basically determined what could be on television for ages because they maintained a letter-writing force of a mere five thousand people. Nobody else was kicking up that level of shit storm, so the networks listened to them.
- matheusmoreira 8y ago
  > they have little to lose. Then let's make them lose. The more widespread bullshit blockers become, the more money they will lose.

SilasX 8y ago

I don't think you're wrong, but you may be overestimating how quickly they converge on an optimal balance, and what fraction of the bloat is necessary for business purposes. I frequently see sites that slow down my browser and mobile sites that become near unusable, and I doubt that is all necessary for making it pretty and having the right analytics. I've also frequently reviewed the work of front-end devs who just didn't see the easy optimizations they could make. The bloat persists until there's a clear relationship between some unit of bloat and some concrete loss, but that might not be easy to see, because you don't see the people who long since gave up on your site. Edit: One illustrative example is disability access accommodations. A lot of them are a net loss to the business, but some of them were obvious improvements no one had thought to do: "Oh, crap, it really does help to have a lip on the curb so you can roll stuff up!"

tannhaeuser 8y ago

Sounds like you work in the publishing business (and also that GP has tripped you up somehow). Care to elaborate what the rationale for publishers to bloat their web sites could possibly be? Because I know I've come to use news aggregators like HN as portal sites (plus RSS) rather than go to news sites directly for many years now, precisely because I want to know beforehand if a particular article is even worth visiting, rather than receive a crapton of script for nothing valuable in exchange.

isleyaardvark 8y ago

I'm sure plenty of sites improve their bottom line by implementing dark UX patterns as well, it doesn't make it any less bullshit.

isoprophlex 8y ago

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

dgudkov 8y ago
>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.
- russdpale 8y ago
  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.
  - true_religion 8y ago
    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.

blub 8y ago

There are many logical reasons why various websites are so bloated. Certainly the market realities and web development culture play a role. That doesn't change the fact that the end result is bullshit, though. The tragedy of the commons is still a tragedy. I don't have a solution for commercial news organisations. If they can't completely subsidise their web presence through other means, it's pretty much guaranteed that the advertising pressures will turn it into crap.

wuliwong 8y ago
I don't understand how you are relating this to the tragedy of the commons other than saying that because something has a reason it doesn't preclude it from being something.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Everyone selfishly optimizing their bottomline ("let's earn a bit more by including extra JS analytics bullshit", "let's save some time on our end by making a million people waste a little bit of electricity every pageview") - each initially reaping some short-term benefits, but together ultimately turning the web into the shitshow it is today. That's textbook tragedy of the commons.
  - monadgonad 8y ago
    People’s/companies’ own websites aren’t commons. The protocols that make up the web itself haven’t degraded through use; this is no more a tragedy of the commons than if every shop in your town made you wait a few seconds before you could go inside.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      No, but the frameworks they use and services they outsource tasks to definitely are commons. Even more so are design and development trends.
      - 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

phyzome 8y ago

It's still bullshit, because it doesn't help the visitor, and it only helps the company to the extent that they're in a Red Queen's Race—if no one else did it, they wouldn't have to either.

dictum 8y ago

I know I'm an idealist too, and my comment will be a display of hypocrisy: it seems that one of the rules for using the Internet is that you should completely forget about the is-ought problem. People will dole out all kinds of advice about technology, business, politics, society, relationships etc. by way of discussing something that only partially resembles reality (and assuming everyone or most people perceive things in the same way as themselves) (I'm guilty of that too.)

bumholio 8y ago

By the same token, maybe the automobile and oil industry really care a lot about the environment, but the only way to produce a safe, affordable and performing car is their tech savvy way refined for a century. Or maybe they just don't give a shit, and the current status quo allows them to make money without caring about the consequences, until we as an informed community demand a better way.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Sniffnoy 8y ago

The fact that people want bullshit or that bullshit sells does not change the fact that it is bullshit.

wuliwong 8y ago

I'm sure I am more consciously aware of the bloat but I do think that subconsciously "non-techy" people still dislike it. I feel like this is similar to the apple vs microsoft/IBM debates. I'm not even sure what the popular take on it is these days but I do believe that to some extent a pleasing user experience was/is championed by Apple (in a specific aesthetic sense). And, if apple never existed we would have less tech products with that user experience philosophy embedded in them. I believe that illusive "pleasing" user experience that apple seemed to try to build in its products is similar to the idea of not having as much bloat on websites. There is business value of consuming every single morsel of user tracking data possible but that tracking also has some cost in terms of user experience. Just because companies have tended towards bloat doesn't mean that they are definitely right. Apple has made a great deal of money and I believe some of that is due to their style of user experience.

rhizome 8y ago

"[B]usiness was improved" is doing a lot of work in there.

ryandrake 8y ago

The tons (and growing) of normal everyday users using ad blockers and other annoyance-reducing web plugins is evidence against this. Also, we are not talking about the expense of “micro-optimization.” We are talking about not deliberately spending the time to add all this BS into the software. I guarantee it costs less to publish a text/plain document than a HTML/CS/JavaScript trash fire.

Zimahl 8y ago

> 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. All i can say is that I work at a small-ish multi-million dollar business that got bought by a very large multi-billion dollar business. Our site has become very, very bloated due to everything that our parent corp wants in the name of 'making things better'. I'm not saying we are stagnant, but those changes really haven't increased our bottom line in any significant way. We now spend more time and dev resources supporting a site with much more 'bullshit'. Real business decisions, ones that benefited the customer, are where real increases in value were seen. This of course is anecdotal, but I've never really heard the opposite.

arkh 8y ago

> Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. You sure won't see those in your analytics dashboard.

GW150914 8y ago

You just used “maybe” eight times to make an argument without having to support it in the slightest. Maybe you’re right, or maybe you’re just bristling at an argument made well and strongly supported without a leg to stand on. Maybe if you bothered to support your claims, or even make them real claims instead of “maybes” it would be easier to take your non-arguments seriously. Of course it would also be easier to take you seriously if ad blockers and script managers and cookie sweepers weren’t so incredibly popular, along with VPNs. Every site begging people for money or to stop using an ad-blocker is a nail in your “point’s” coffin.

swsieber 8y ago

Or maybe it's really easy to have all the individual decisions make sense, but still arrive at a really insensible complete decision. Like a local maxima. It's easy to be smart, make smart decisions and end up somewhere dumb.

eadmund 8y ago

You make a good point: the people who have ruined the Web are doing it because it makes them a profit. That's the whole point of ethics & morality, though: refraining from what benefits us immediately because it's wrong. And just as it's wrong to kill the old lady next door to steal her house, it's wrong to turn a product-listing site into a JavaScript-laden monstrosity so terrible my phone becomes painfully hot to the touch.

vertexFarm 8y ago

I don't know, as much as I respect you looking out for the "engineer as savior" bias and the fact that average users may have a distinctly different viewpoint than we do, in this case it seems somewhat disingenuous. People have spoken time and again about needless auto-playing video clips. About weird, busted scroll hijacks and massive header images. About newsletter beggars which take up the whole screen on every. single. site. About ubiquitous "got it!" cookie disclaimers. About pages that load mountains of extraneous crap while you're trying to read, and reflows the text halfway through the second paragraph, suspiciously at the exact moment you try to tap a link which makes you click an ad instead, which is of course bloated with poison dogshit and offal and immediately crashes the tab. About how every single major site bullies you into downloading an app instead of putting effort into making their mobile site run properly. Instead the mobile site is intentionally crippled to incentivize the adtech-infected app even more, and even the request desktop mode is broken. And of course the mobile app is only a thinly-veiled plot to scrape your phone's guts out like a dead fish and gain every permission possible. If it can run in a browser, I think it should run in a browser. I'm highly suspicious of any app that is really just a website in a tarted-up trojan horse. Adblockers are perpetually on the rise, as the article says, and other content blockers and filters are also in play now. I have to use outline.com to read most news articles, which is an amazing resource. But I think this popular opinion is warranted. The internet is bloated with malicious bullshit. Everyone got in an arms race with each other and had to do it, despite nobody actually wanting it. I don't think the devs and designers who made this stuff so ubiquitous are evil, nor are they stupid. They were just caught in a catch-22 as web trends do their fickle thing. They are regular people earnestly doing their best, just like everyone else. Doomed to create camel after camel via feedback from ignorant clients, misread focus groups, neurotic middle management, et cetera. People rarely get to decide or unilaterally invent any of these large-scale trends, they just happen as a herd phenomenon I think. And everyone has to jump on board to remain viable, or at least that's the illusion at the time.

pauljonas 8y ago

No, it's herd mentality. Because it's what everyone else is doing, it's the standard, it's what you do and to be an outlier in this is to be deluged with how archaic you are and then be swarmed in marketing jargon that breaks down page element interactions to an atomic level. Meanwhile, users ditch the bloated web pages for apps or if browsing from a laptop or desktop computer, for a curated view delivered by Facebook or Twitter or another service in the long tail (i.e., Tumblr, Pinterest, etc.). The effect may not even be plainly noticeable but it does work on a psychological level. All the cruft and gunk dissuades repeat visits and any desire to return to browse that internet space. Some online spaces, and mostly in the news vein are even overtly abominable. My local news outlet (azcentral.com) is unbearable to load, with the autoplay video, the barrage of ads, both popovers and the hard elements that take space in display. Leaving just a tiny portion of the screen real estate to actual content that a reader might be interested in.

KaiserPro 8y ago

I used to work at the FT, and we tested a number of hypotheses: 1) faster page loads means better engagement 2) everyone hates popups. 3) everyone hates autoplay turns out that faster page loads _do_ make user happy, normal non tech savvy users happy. (source: http://engineroom.ft.com/2016/04/04/a-faster-ft-com/ http://engineroom.ft.com/2016/04/04/a-faster-ft-com/) I don't think the popup experiment has a write up, but people _hate_ popups, even more when they are not relevant. I was part of the auto play experiment, and whilst a few people really like them, it saves them clicking, the vast majority hate it with a passion. Auto play is a thing because it boosts ad impressions between 25-80% So for ad based revenue, yes, I can see why people do this. For subscribing sites, it kills your bottom line. So empirically they either rely too much on ads, or are idiots who don't have evidence to base decisions on.

furicane 8y ago

> Maybe other people making these decisions aren't idiots Nice joke, I liked it! :)