4 ms·

From a capitalist devil’s advocate point of view: does it really matter that your website works poorly with 90% of the web when these 90% either don’t have any

by ansgri 5y ago

From a capitalist devil’s advocate point of view: does it really matter that your website works poorly with 90% of the web when these 90% either don’t have any disposable income (there’s got to be a correlation) or are too distant geographically and culturally to ever bring you business? The “commercial quality” (i.e. to avoid looking worse than competition) web development has become unbelievably complicated and expensive, so in reality probably only individual enthusiasts and NCOs should care about the long tail. Local small businesses will just use some local site builder or social media, so even they don’t matter.

hokumguru 5y ago
From the other capitalist point of view, wouldn’t it be more ideal to squeeze every single percentage of the market if you could? I think most companies would gladly take a 10% boost in sales. Furthermore, that’s only the bottom 10% of America, appealing to their audience appeals to maybe the top percentage of India and Asia as well which are giant markets
- pjscott 5y ago
  That depends on how much money it takes to get a bit more of the market and how much money you expect to get from them. Ideally you'd reach the point where those two derivatives are equal, then stop.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
That assumes that you can appropriately target the 10% that are profitable. If you can't reliably do that or the profitable 10% isn't 10% with the highest performance computers and connections, then you probably are better served by casting a wide net.
- blowski 5y ago
  What if, to take advantage of the profitable 10%, you are better off providing a rich page, albeit with a large filesize? I have no evidence to support that claim, other than that large profitable companies generally seem to think this is the case.
mumblemumble 5y ago
These sorts of characterizations are just way, way, way too simplistic. Assume that I earn a six figure income and live in a major city with reasonably fast (though not necessarily top tier) Internet. So, y'know, theoretically a fairly desirable customer and not a subsistence farmer or some other demographic that's easy to give the cold shoulder. But still -- Bad Internet day, maybe someone's getting DDoS attacked? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. It's Friday evening and the Internet is crammed full of Netflix? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. Neighbor's running some device that leaks a bunch of radio noise and degrades my wifi network? It's Friday evening and the Internet is crammed full of Netflix? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. I'm connecting from a coffee shop with spotty Internet? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. I've got 50,000 tabs open and they're all eating up a crapton of RAM? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. I'm browsing while I've got some background task like a big compile or whatever chewing up my CPU? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. I'm accessing from my mobile device and I'm in a dead zone (they're common in major cities doncha know)? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. etc. etc. etc. Meanwhile, while it may not be the style of the times, it's absolutely possible to make very good looking websites with no or very little JavaScript. Frankly, a lot of them look and feel even better than over-engineered virtual DOM "applications" do. Without all that JavaScript in the way, the UX feels downright snappy. https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/ is a nice example.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  In another thread I just read this[1]: "Using a systems language where it’s not required is just burning time and money." and was considering a response like yours. Is there actually going to be any noticable consequences to the jank of Slack, Teams, GMail, and so on bringing laptops to their knees and damaging user morale and taking a company brand reputation hit? After you get frustrated by the jank and leave, is there anything else you can do except go back because the people and customers and services you need to deal with are using the janky systems, and all the systems are janky these days - and finding ones which aren't, and predicting they will stay that way, and moving to them, is non-trivial? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27406824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27406824
nunez 5y ago
It does if your business is low margin high volume and the 90% you reference have _enough_ disposable income to buy the basics. I.e. literally all of retail and consumer banking. Most businesses fall into this category. Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix fall into this category. That’s why their reliability engineers are amongst the highest paid engineers in those businesses. They literally cannot afford to be down. The ironic thing about your argument is that I’ve found recently that the more something costs, the more difficult it is to procure, ESPECIALLY online. Some of the most expensive items out there simply cannot be purchased online end-to-end. looking to rent an apartment online? Easy. Looking to rent or buy a house? A billion moving parts, with half a million of those parts needing to be done face to face.
Seirdy 5y ago
Strong disagree but upvoting for a good discussion. Some situations to give your "capitalist devil" pause: - A train passenger on the way to their summer home enters a tunnel. Packet loss goes through the roof and nothing but HTML loads. - A hotel room housing an attendee of a local shareholder meeting has awful shared wi-fi. - Ping speeds plummet on a politician's private jet. - Someone hoping to buy a new Rolex at the mall can barely connect in the underground parking garage. Everyone hits the bottom of the bell curve.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  - Plenty of wealthy people on cruise ships or yachts with high-latency uplinks - Approx 1 million crew are at sea at the same time on average
ufmace 5y ago
Depends on the site. It'd be nice if somebody's individual blog about the cool tech thing they built was accessible to everyone everywhere. If you are a business that can fundamentally only serve customers in city X, then it's perfectly reasonable to use tech that might not work for people outside of city X. There's a lot of space in between those, so use your judgement I guess.
toast0 5y ago
This falls down because people with lots of money have cabins in the woods with garbage internet. If they can't load your page from there, there goes that lucrative customer. Or they may be on a ferry, or a small aircraft or etc.
bdcravens 5y ago
The assumption you are making here is that the preferred customers you're talking here are always on quality connections, and that poor connections are limited to undesired customers. The same user who accesses your site from an 800MB wifi signal may need to access the same site in spotty 4G scenario.
goodpoint 5y ago
I've never seen any example of businesses making deliberate choices on websites size and loading time. The web "development" world is just too messy and hype driven.
jart 5y ago
Software bloat works by the same principle as dynamic range compression does for rock musicians. DRC creates fake loudness by removing a dimension of complexity from audio tracks. Rock musicians complain all the time about how they need to do it in order to sound professional, because everyone else does it. With software it's the same way. Many consumers have come to associate bloat with value. If you sell someone a 300kb exe file, then they might feel robbed if your competitor ships a 30gb installer that in essence does the same thing. What's the solution? Don't write rock music. Focus on classical, jazz, opera, ballet, etc. which has a fewer number of fans with more money who have a better education in appreciating your music. That same concept can be applied to software.
andai 5y ago
The article mentions this halfway down the page in the section "The average user fallacy" using AirBnb as an example. If you're traveling, internet can be unreliable. AirBnb's customers are people who want to travel.

by ansgri 5y ago

hokumguru 5y ago

From the other capitalist point of view, wouldn’t it be more ideal to squeeze every single percentage of the market if you could? I think most companies would gladly take a 10% boost in sales. Furthermore, that’s only the bottom 10% of America, appealing to their audience appeals to maybe the top percentage of India and Asia as well which are giant markets

pjscott 5y ago
That depends on how much money it takes to get a bit more of the market and how much money you expect to get from them. Ideally you'd reach the point where those two derivatives are equal, then stop.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

That assumes that you can appropriately target the 10% that are profitable. If you can't reliably do that or the profitable 10% isn't 10% with the highest performance computers and connections, then you probably are better served by casting a wide net.

blowski 5y ago
What if, to take advantage of the profitable 10%, you are better off providing a rich page, albeit with a large filesize? I have no evidence to support that claim, other than that large profitable companies generally seem to think this is the case.

mumblemumble 5y ago

These sorts of characterizations are just way, way, way too simplistic. Assume that I earn a six figure income and live in a major city with reasonably fast (though not necessarily top tier) Internet. So, y'know, theoretically a fairly desirable customer and not a subsistence farmer or some other demographic that's easy to give the cold shoulder. But still -- Bad Internet day, maybe someone's getting DDoS attacked? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. It's Friday evening and the Internet is crammed full of Netflix? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. Neighbor's running some device that leaks a bunch of radio noise and degrades my wifi network? It's Friday evening and the Internet is crammed full of Netflix? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. I'm connecting from a coffee shop with spotty Internet? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. I've got 50,000 tabs open and they're all eating up a crapton of RAM? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. I'm browsing while I've got some background task like a big compile or whatever chewing up my CPU? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. I'm accessing from my mobile device and I'm in a dead zone (they're common in major cities doncha know)? If your website isn't lean, I'm more likely to get frustrated by the jank and leave. etc. etc. etc. Meanwhile, while it may not be the style of the times, it's absolutely possible to make very good looking websites with no or very little JavaScript. Frankly, a lot of them look and feel even better than over-engineered virtual DOM "applications" do. Without all that JavaScript in the way, the UX feels downright snappy. https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/ is a nice example.

jodrellblank 5y ago
In another thread I just read this[1]: "Using a systems language where it’s not required is just burning time and money." and was considering a response like yours. Is there actually going to be any noticable consequences to the jank of Slack, Teams, GMail, and so on bringing laptops to their knees and damaging user morale and taking a company brand reputation hit? After you get frustrated by the jank and leave, is there anything else you can do except go back because the people and customers and services you need to deal with are using the janky systems, and all the systems are janky these days - and finding ones which aren't, and predicting they will stay that way, and moving to them, is non-trivial? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27406824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27406824

nunez 5y ago

It does if your business is low margin high volume and the 90% you reference have _enough_ disposable income to buy the basics. I.e. literally all of retail and consumer banking. Most businesses fall into this category. Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix fall into this category. That’s why their reliability engineers are amongst the highest paid engineers in those businesses. They literally cannot afford to be down. The ironic thing about your argument is that I’ve found recently that the more something costs, the more difficult it is to procure, ESPECIALLY online. Some of the most expensive items out there simply cannot be purchased online end-to-end. looking to rent an apartment online? Easy. Looking to rent or buy a house? A billion moving parts, with half a million of those parts needing to be done face to face.

Seirdy 5y ago

Strong disagree but upvoting for a good discussion. Some situations to give your "capitalist devil" pause: - A train passenger on the way to their summer home enters a tunnel. Packet loss goes through the roof and nothing but HTML loads. - A hotel room housing an attendee of a local shareholder meeting has awful shared wi-fi. - Ping speeds plummet on a politician's private jet. - Someone hoping to buy a new Rolex at the mall can barely connect in the underground parking garage. Everyone hits the bottom of the bell curve.

goodpoint 5y ago
- Plenty of wealthy people on cruise ships or yachts with high-latency uplinks - Approx 1 million crew are at sea at the same time on average

ufmace 5y ago

Depends on the site. It'd be nice if somebody's individual blog about the cool tech thing they built was accessible to everyone everywhere. If you are a business that can fundamentally only serve customers in city X, then it's perfectly reasonable to use tech that might not work for people outside of city X. There's a lot of space in between those, so use your judgement I guess.

toast0 5y ago

This falls down because people with lots of money have cabins in the woods with garbage internet. If they can't load your page from there, there goes that lucrative customer. Or they may be on a ferry, or a small aircraft or etc.

bdcravens 5y ago

The assumption you are making here is that the preferred customers you're talking here are always on quality connections, and that poor connections are limited to undesired customers. The same user who accesses your site from an 800MB wifi signal may need to access the same site in spotty 4G scenario.

goodpoint 5y ago

I've never seen any example of businesses making deliberate choices on websites size and loading time. The web "development" world is just too messy and hype driven.

jart 5y ago

Software bloat works by the same principle as dynamic range compression does for rock musicians. DRC creates fake loudness by removing a dimension of complexity from audio tracks. Rock musicians complain all the time about how they need to do it in order to sound professional, because everyone else does it. With software it's the same way. Many consumers have come to associate bloat with value. If you sell someone a 300kb exe file, then they might feel robbed if your competitor ships a 30gb installer that in essence does the same thing. What's the solution? Don't write rock music. Focus on classical, jazz, opera, ballet, etc. which has a fewer number of fans with more money who have a better education in appreciating your music. That same concept can be applied to software.

andai 5y ago

The article mentions this halfway down the page in the section "The average user fallacy" using AirBnb as an example. If you're traveling, internet can be unreliable. AirBnb's customers are people who want to travel.