Well, launch your preferred browser, open the devtools (F12 in Firefox), make a request on the homepage of Reddit and HN and look at the result in the "debugger

Well, launch your preferred browser, open the devtools (F12 in Firefox), make a request on the homepage of Reddit and HN and look at the result in the "debugger". - For HN you only have an optimized HTML page as well a short javascript download. - For Reddit you have a truckload of files which then dynamically load content piece by piece, and also loads ad content from elsewhere (c.amazon-adsystem.com in my case). Reddit's full content is bigger than HN's, but that isn't really a problem. The real problem is that everything is loaded by tiny chuncks, which adds loads of latencies for a total of a few seconds to load the page. If everything was in one big file it would be (and feel) way faster.