7 ms·

Slack has an entire app ecosystem layer in it these days, not to mention they've never really trimmed down the electron fat. Slack hasn't been a contender for "

Slack has an entire app ecosystem layer in it these days, not to mention they've never really trimmed down the electron fat. Slack hasn't been a contender for "well made" in quite a few months. NYT should be a relatively simple website. Sure, they have some very nice interactive stories and we'll give those a pass, but even just plain text articles load an amazing amount of cruft. It's text, just send the damn text. Everyone else being bloated isn't an excuse.

cptskippy 6y ago
> Slack hasn't been a contender for "well made" in quite a few months. It was a contender? > NYT should be a relatively simple website. There's editors from the NYT lurking here who will strongly disagree.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  Once upon a time, Slack was actually really solid and I happily used it. It.. was quite some time ago. And sure, obviously NYT is more complex than throwing textfiles at users.. but do you really need to be running A/B tests for acquisition and have such a complicated pipeline to buying a subscription? Do you need dozens of analytics suites? Data is useful, but only to an upper bound of what you can meaningfully analyze.
  - cptskippy 6y ago
    I don't disagree with you AND I've already been chastised once in the last week by a NYT staff member for daring to challenge their assertion that the web should be and overly complicated mess.
    - vorpalhex 6y ago
      Cutting through institutional pressures is not easy, especially when those pressures are well entrenched. I recently had to rid our SEO department of a religious belief that everything in creation must be server-side rendered or it couldn't be indexed and the phrase "holy war" applies. So, I have some empathy for the NYT staff as individual contributors, but as an org, it's time to evolve.
  - stimpson_j_cat 6y ago
    .
    - jsjw7sbw 6y ago
      Are you working for booking.com?
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
The New York Times's Homepage isn't just text though. I see a lot of large, high-quality images, many of which transition to other images so you can see multiple visuals for a story. There's a "live updates" sidebar and a real-time stock ticker. There are video and audio embeds. > Everyone else being bloated isn't an excuse. It's not, but I'd rather focus on the worst offenders instead of the half-decent ones. I didn't compare it to Slack because I thought Slack was a good example—I did it for the exact opposite reason. And, as long as there are sites that are so much heavier and yet seem to be doing fine (I don't like it, but it is what it is), I doubt NY Times is removing 3rd-party ads due to performance issues. It could be a nice side effect, though.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  For comparison, I disabled ublock origin and privacy badger and loaded https://fivethirtyeight.com https://fivethirtyeight.com which is in the same realm - heavy text content with several interactive widgets, video and audio embeds. Render time for my (aging) macbook pro is within the acceptable threshold (< 1500ms), memory snapshot in firefox is ~90Mb, and it feels like it loads quickly and responsively. It could be better - but it's infinitely more usable than NYT for me.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - VHRanger 6y ago
    I don't think 1.5sec render time is acceptable for a webpage whose main payload of interest is 2-5kb of text (the article).
    - JustFinishedBSG 6y ago
      There's no articles on the page linked, and all the graphs on the right are dynamically rendered
      - Intermernet 6y ago
x3blah 6y ago
"It's text, just send the damn text." They only send what the user requests. Using a software program that makes automatic requests that you are not easily in control of, e.g., a popular web browser, might give the impression that they control what is sent. They do not control what is sent. The user does.^1 The user makes a request and they send a response. One of the requests a fully-automatic web browser makes to NYT is to static01.nyt.com Personally, as a user who prefers text-only, this is the only request I need to make. As such I don't really need a heavily marketed, fully-automatic, graphical, ad-blocking web browser to make a single request for some text.^2 #! /bin/sh case $1 in world |w*) x=world # shortcut: w ;;us |u*) x=us # shortcut: u ;;politics |p*) x=politics # shortcut: p ;;nyregion |n*) x=nyregion # shortcut: n ;;business |bu*) x=business # shortcut: bu ;;opinion |o*) x=opinion # shortcut: o ;;technology |te*) x=technology # shortcut: te ;;science |sc*) x=science # shortcut: sc ;;health |h*) x=health # shortcut: h ;;sports |sp*) x=sports # shortcut: sp ;;arts |a*) x=arts # shortcut: a ;;books |bo*) x=books # shortcut: bo ;;style |st*) x=style # shortcut: st ;;food |f*) x=food # shortcut: f ;;travel |tr*) x=travel # shortcut: tr ;;magazine |m*) x=magazine # shortcut: m ;;t-magazine |t-*) x=t-magazine # shortcut: t- ;;realestate |r*) x=realestate # shortcut: r ;;*) echo usage: $0 section exec sed -n '/x=/!d;s/.*x=//;/sed/!p' $0 esac curl -s https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/$x/index.jsonp Example: Make simple page of titles, article urls and captions, where above script is named "nyt". nyt tr | sed '/\"headline\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/\".*/<\/p>/;p};/\"full\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/..$/<\/p>/;p};/\"link\": \"/{s///;s/ *//;s/\".*//;s|.*|<a href=&>&</a>|;p}' > travel.html firefox ./travel.html Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22125882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22125882 The truth is that they are just sending the damn text. However you are voluntarily choosing to use a software program that is automatically making requests for things other than the text of the article, i.e., "cruft". 1. The Google-sponsored HTTP/[23] protocol is seeking to change this dynamic, so if websites sending stuff to you without you requesting it first bothers you, you might want to think about how online advertisers and the companies that enable them might use these new protocols. 2. However I might use one for for viewing images, watching video, reading PDFs, etc., offline. Web browsers are useful programs for consuming media. It is in the simple task of making HTTP requests that their utility has diminished over time. The user is not really in control.

cptskippy 6y ago

> Slack hasn't been a contender for "well made" in quite a few months. It was a contender? > NYT should be a relatively simple website. There's editors from the NYT lurking here who will strongly disagree.

vorpalhex 6y ago
Once upon a time, Slack was actually really solid and I happily used it. It.. was quite some time ago. And sure, obviously NYT is more complex than throwing textfiles at users.. but do you really need to be running A/B tests for acquisition and have such a complicated pipeline to buying a subscription? Do you need dozens of analytics suites? Data is useful, but only to an upper bound of what you can meaningfully analyze.
- cptskippy 6y ago
  I don't disagree with you AND I've already been chastised once in the last week by a NYT staff member for daring to challenge their assertion that the web should be and overly complicated mess.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    Cutting through institutional pressures is not easy, especially when those pressures are well entrenched. I recently had to rid our SEO department of a religious belief that everything in creation must be server-side rendered or it couldn't be indexed and the phrase "holy war" applies. So, I have some empathy for the NYT staff as individual contributors, but as an org, it's time to evolve.
- stimpson_j_cat 6y ago
  .
  - jsjw7sbw 6y ago
    Are you working for booking.com?

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

The New York Times's Homepage isn't just text though. I see a lot of large, high-quality images, many of which transition to other images so you can see multiple visuals for a story. There's a "live updates" sidebar and a real-time stock ticker. There are video and audio embeds. > Everyone else being bloated isn't an excuse. It's not, but I'd rather focus on the worst offenders instead of the half-decent ones. I didn't compare it to Slack because I thought Slack was a good example—I did it for the exact opposite reason. And, as long as there are sites that are so much heavier and yet seem to be doing fine (I don't like it, but it is what it is), I doubt NY Times is removing 3rd-party ads due to performance issues. It could be a nice side effect, though.

vorpalhex 6y ago
For comparison, I disabled ublock origin and privacy badger and loaded https://fivethirtyeight.com https://fivethirtyeight.com which is in the same realm - heavy text content with several interactive widgets, video and audio embeds. Render time for my (aging) macbook pro is within the acceptable threshold (< 1500ms), memory snapshot in firefox is ~90Mb, and it feels like it loads quickly and responsively. It could be better - but it's infinitely more usable than NYT for me.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- VHRanger 6y ago
  I don't think 1.5sec render time is acceptable for a webpage whose main payload of interest is 2-5kb of text (the article).
  - JustFinishedBSG 6y ago
    There's no articles on the page linked, and all the graphs on the right are dynamically rendered
    - Intermernet 6y ago

x3blah 6y ago

"It's text, just send the damn text." They only send what the user requests. Using a software program that makes automatic requests that you are not easily in control of, e.g., a popular web browser, might give the impression that they control what is sent. They do not control what is sent. The user does.^1 The user makes a request and they send a response. One of the requests a fully-automatic web browser makes to NYT is to static01.nyt.com Personally, as a user who prefers text-only, this is the only request I need to make. As such I don't really need a heavily marketed, fully-automatic, graphical, ad-blocking web browser to make a single request for some text.^2 #! /bin/sh case $1 in world |w*) x=world # shortcut: w ;;us |u*) x=us # shortcut: u ;;politics |p*) x=politics # shortcut: p ;;nyregion |n*) x=nyregion # shortcut: n ;;business |bu*) x=business # shortcut: bu ;;opinion |o*) x=opinion # shortcut: o ;;technology |te*) x=technology # shortcut: te ;;science |sc*) x=science # shortcut: sc ;;health |h*) x=health # shortcut: h ;;sports |sp*) x=sports # shortcut: sp ;;arts |a*) x=arts # shortcut: a ;;books |bo*) x=books # shortcut: bo ;;style |st*) x=style # shortcut: st ;;food |f*) x=food # shortcut: f ;;travel |tr*) x=travel # shortcut: tr ;;magazine |m*) x=magazine # shortcut: m ;;t-magazine |t-*) x=t-magazine # shortcut: t- ;;realestate |r*) x=realestate # shortcut: r ;;*) echo usage: $0 section exec sed -n '/x=/!d;s/.*x=//;/sed/!p' $0 esac curl -s https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/$x/index.jsonp Example: Make simple page of titles, article urls and captions, where above script is named "nyt". nyt tr | sed '/\"headline\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/\".*/<\/p>/;p};/\"full\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/..$/<\/p>/;p};/\"link\": \"/{s///;s/ *//;s/\".*//;s|.*|<a href=&>&</a>|;p}' > travel.html firefox ./travel.html Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22125882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22125882 The truth is that they are just sending the damn text. However you are voluntarily choosing to use a software program that is automatically making requests for things other than the text of the article, i.e., "cruft". 1. The Google-sponsored HTTP/[23] protocol is seeking to change this dynamic, so if websites sending stuff to you without you requesting it first bothers you, you might want to think about how online advertisers and the companies that enable them might use these new protocols. 2. However I might use one for for viewing images, watching video, reading PDFs, etc., offline. Web browsers are useful programs for consuming media. It is in the simple task of making HTTP requests that their utility has diminished over time. The user is not really in control.