I hate autoplaying videos and bloated adware as much as anyone else on here, and I'm very partial to arguments in favor of increased accessibility. But the thes

I hate autoplaying videos and bloated adware as much as anyone else on here, and I'm very partial to arguments in favor of increased accessibility. But the thesis of the article is that optimizing cost-to-produce at the expense of time-spent-waiting-for-the-page-to-load is an optimization that fundamentally undercuts the poor. There wasn't much data showing this to be true, and I suspect the opposite may be. If reducing pageload time increased costs, would poor people be happy to pay more for the faster product, or would it just drive them out from being able to afford it? Or in the case of free services that make money via advertising and tracking, would it be better to do more of that to pay for the extra cost needed to produce the good in order to shave off pageload time? I'm not so sure. "Make it better and more expensive" is an easy argument to make if you're a wealthy software engineer, but I'm not convinced that applying "better and more expensive" as a value helps those lower on the socioeconomic ladder. Focusing on "make it cheaper to be better" seems like it would do more to make experiences more equitable — i.e. we should improve the developer experience of high-performance open-source tools so that it takes less time and costs less to make better products, rather than driving up the cost of production at the (literal monetary or privacy) expense of users in order to produce a faster product. Edit: Or, y'know, we should pay CEOs less and use those savings to make better products without increasing the costs passed on to our users... But somehow I don't see that happening any time soon.