16 ms·

What Does My Site Cost?

378 points by shadowfaxRodeo 5y ago

hakube 5y ago
I wonder how much would it cost to visit CNN
- SamuelAdams 5y ago
  There is lite.cnn.com for a text-only experience.
deergomoo 5y ago
I feel this is more an indictment of Canadian data prices than Reddit’s bloat. Why on Earth is it so expensive?
- OJFord 5y ago
  They still have intranational (i.e. cross-province, I assume) long distance call charges too.
  - voisin 5y ago
    This is largely eliminated. Koodo tried to reinstate it this year and there was a backlash. Though Telus still has landline plans in BC that have long distance costs outside of your city!
- lpcvoid 5y ago
  No matter what the cost per MB, why is it completely normal for everybody nowadays that websites can be multiple million bytes in size? It's text after all. Boggles my mind.
  - rplnt 5y ago
    Jira (ticketing system - all text) is like 30 MB on first download, most of it javascript. It also barely runs on 2017 MB Pro.
    - lpcvoid 5y ago
      I have to work with that daily, and yeah, it drives me insane.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      Yes Jira is terrible, not just from a javascript point of view but usability as well. Unfortunately we have to manage our hours in it.
  - throwaway984393 5y ago
    Software is a gas, and our containers keep getting bigger.
  - omegabravo 5y ago
    at the same time, which GUI applications on your computer are only 1.3mb? 1.3mb seems optimised to me at first glance
    - lpcvoid 5y ago
      It's possible to create GUI applications with under 10kb in size, if you link dynamically and use raw win32 api. Pretty sure that my personal wxwidget stuff was way under 100kb too back in the days. Never used GTK directly on linux, but again, 1MB is an indicator that you are either linking statically, or doing something wrong.
    - chousuke 5y ago
      How much signal is there in that 1.3MB though? We don't think about the weight of websites much nowadays because we have insane bandwidth, but how much of that is actual content? The text on one page can't be more than a few kilobytes, and images don't have to be much more data either if they're just thumbnails.
    - bscphil 5y ago
      Many of them, thanks in part to dynamic linking. (I don't think excluding DLLs is too unfair, after all the browser constitutes an enormous Javascript runtime environment.) VLC is one of the more complex programs out there, and yet the VLC binaries and the libvlc libraries they ship with total only 1.295 MiB on my computer. The main application for Scid, a chess database program, is only 1.1 MiB. (The program also comes with a simple test chess engine and some opening books, so the overall package is somewhat larger.) The binary and libraries for hexchat, an IRC application, total 1.22 MiB. The program files for Pinta, an image editing program, come in right at 1.3 MB. The vast majority of programs are under 10 MiB total. Moreover, I've tried to pick relatively full featured desktop apps, and desktop apps as a rule do more than any 1 MB web page. And these applications come in highly compressed archives, which means that their download size is often significantly less. Furthermore, I would argue that web pages are rarely comparable to applications. When you're browsing Reddit, if the home page is 1.3 MiB on mobile, chances are the first individual post you click on is also going to be 1.3 MiB, and the one after that, and so on. You don't get the benefits of Reddit by downloading an "application" one time and getting tiny updates after that. If you're lucky most of the libraries being pulled in will get cached, but frequently it doesn't work out that way. On desktop Reddit, a warm refresh of the site still used more than 2.5 MiB for me, and that's with an ad blocker enabled.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    The people who develop said sites live in a bubble where high speed computers and internet are the norm, and many of them are too young to remember when computers were actually slow, so they don't really understand how unbelievably wasteful their product is.
    - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
      “Developer experience” they chant, as they sit in cushy chairs, and post on social media in between grunt builds.
  - montroser 5y ago
    Indeed. Compare to https://teddit.net https://teddit.net (no-js reddit front end), and you can see the vast difference in bandwidth and performance. Some of the cause of all this has to do with market forces and prioritizing speed of development over customer experience. But I don't think that's the whole story.
  - 0xTJ 5y ago
    This is why I only use old.reddit.com. If they ever stop providing the old Reddit, I doubt I'll keep using it. Sure the old one isn't perfect, but I find the new one borderline unusable, even on a modern laptop. There's a furniture chain here that has a website so terrible, I just gave up on trying to buy what I wanted from them. So much happening in JavaScript to make things happen on the page. I have to imagine it's also terribly written, since it freezes up the tab most of the time, and Firefox suggests killing the script.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      Yes it (new reddit) even brings my i5 to its knees... Way overbloated with javascript. Also in FF by the way. Perhaps Chrome is better but I won't use it.
    - decrypt 5y ago
      I relate to this a lot. reddit.com struggles to load on my MacBook Air 2015, or a Windows with 9th gen i5 with 8GB RAM. I have an extension on my Firefox to always load the old reddit. There is an account-specific setting to always load old reddit, but there are times when I browse without an account.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      It won't be around for much long I am afraid. Now to accept cookie policies you need first to accept being redirected into the new site, and then manually return to old version. I bet in about one year time the old is gone.
      - bscphil 5y ago
        I don't think I've ever been asked to accept a cookie policy on Reddit. I normally only browse Reddit while logged in, so that could be part of it. Is this a new thing?
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Yep, specially when always deleting cookies and living in Europe.
  - silvestrov 5y ago
    Especially reddit which has such a simple UI that no frameworks are needed. If you drop support for MSIE 11 and only support modern browsers the modern javascript is surprisingly compact. But then your CV looks stupid: no frameworks on the list. How would you ever get a job again? How do you get any respect if you say "I just code javascript directly on the browser", sounds like you're too stupid to learn a framework. You will only get respect from the very best developers but not all the copy/paste 'developers', no respect from the HR department nor mediocre managers. It's an uphill battle.
    - deergomoo 5y ago
      Use of frameworks is often blamed for bloat, but the two are completely independent. React is about 110kB. Vue is 33kB. It's perfectly possible (and really not that hard) to write fast, small web apps with the big popular JS frameworks. It's the thoughtless stuff people do—pulling in huge libraries for tiny features, mandating the use of huge analytics packages, etc—that cause the bloat. Whether it should all just be server-rendered is a whole other argument, but if you're going to build something the size and scale of reddit as a client-rendered app, you'd be crazy to not use one of the existing frameworks IMO. If for no other reason than you're likely to end up just re-creating a worse version of them.
      - bscphil 5y ago
        I think bloat really means two different things. One is the obvious "file size" issue, and as you are mentioning it's quite possible to write small sites even using heavy-weight frameworks. But a lot of the complaints in this thread boil down to modern sites being slow to run on computers that are only a few years old. If modern frameworks are to blame for that, it's not because they're a hundred (or more) KB. It's because they require the end user to run way more Javascript in the browser and consume far more memory than a site with minimal Javascript requires to accomplish the same thing. As a random example, Firefox's about:performance page says that the three YouTube tabs I have open are each consuming about 50 MB of my computer's memory. That's obscene. (None of the tabs are open on a video, so this is not the result of storing videos in RAM.) Also, I did a Lighthouse analysis of the Reddit home page in Chrome (on Desktop, but targeting mobile). The page scores less than 20/100 on performance, and takes almost twenty seconds to become interactive!! The biggest problem Lighthouse sees with the page is not the file size, but the amount of Javascript being executed. There's ~25 seconds of "main thread work" being done in my test.
  - cesarb 5y ago
    For perspective, a common high-density floppy disk is 1.4 megabytes. A whole operating system, complete with GUI, could fit in that space.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- nelox 5y ago
  My guess is monopolistic power at play
- ricardo81 5y ago
  Spent a few years living in Canada but mostly in the UK. It seemed that Canadian prices were roughly double. My anecdotal guess is that the infrastructure costs are higher in Canada due to lower population density. Lots more area to cover to achieve the same coverage.
  - voisin 5y ago
    I have heard this argument and the counter is that Australia has low population density like Canada and significantly lower costs. It all comes down to competition. We Canadians love our oligopolies!
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    No. It's just utter bullshit due to a lack of competition. The province with the cheapest rates for wireless is not dense, population rich Ontario. It's one of the least dense, least populus. Why? Oh, because they have an extra wireless competitor in the form of a Crown Corp. Other countries like Australia have similar densities and infrastructure costs yet still have way lower prices. The Canadian telecom industry is sheltered and there's really only 3 big players. Foreign competition isn't allowed so there's no possibility of Verizon or Vodafone coming in and shaking things up.
    - davidy123 5y ago
      Ontario has 14 persons per square mile. The population density of ALL of Western Europe is 181, ten times greater, Netherlands is 521. Ontario is quite a bit closer to other "less dense" provinces than most countries used for comparison. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-territories-by-population-density.html#bottom https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-t... https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-population-density.html#bottom https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-po... I'm not posting enough references here, but this whole conversation has been so limited in facts and proportion. The point is the government wants carriers to provide service everywhere, which includes places like Nunavut, 0.019 persons per square mile. There are local initiatives, and some are really fantastic, but it's difficult to bootstrap those everywhere. Go to https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/fourprov.htm https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/fourprov.htm and search for Nunavut and see who comes up. These prices need to come down, more competition and local initiatives need to happen, and more innovation for systems like mesh networks. It is particularly upsetting when ways can't be found to share infrastructure. But if providing access to every Canadian is the goal (rather than for every person in a city at a cost less than a bag of groceries) there is probably some logic to the existing system. Some people will say "just pay for Starlink everywhere," but it's really not ok for a country's access to be owned by another country (as long as Musk is still on earth), wired ultimately has advantages, and there are probably benefits to supporting wired infrastructure, and competition and choice are important.
- shadowfaxRodeo 5y ago
  To put it in perspective, the average website costs $0.12 in Canada. Both an indictment of general bloat and Canada data prices. More interesting is how much it costs for people in poorer countries — Where the absolute value of visiting a site is less, but relative to income is far greater. Understandably you don't see much about this online — people with expensive data plans don't use it all up complaining about it online.
  - cube2222 5y ago
    Poorer countries (let's say those in the middle) quite often have newer network infrastructure, so prices are actually much better, even relative to income. In Poland it's around 0.25$ per GB for mobile networks. So 1MB is 0.00025$ and a visit to reddit according to the above calculations would be 0.0003475$. The prices in the US and Canada are ridiculous from that perspective.
    - shadowfaxRodeo 5y ago
      I should have said, some specific poorer countries. India has incredibly cheap data. While Mauritania has the most expensive in the world compared with the average income.
    - adventured 5y ago
      > The prices in the US and Canada are ridiculous from that perspective. The prices in the US aren't actually a serious problem any longer (they were if you go back 10 years, before T-Mobile's climb changed the market). Americans can trivially afford it given their disposable incomes at the median are among the highest on the planet. US plan prices have declined over the past ten years in nominal terms, while inflation has eroded another 30% of the price. $50-$60 is a nearly meaningless part of the average person's monthly budget in the US now (the median full-time income is $50,000, and Americans have low taxes at the median, which is where the high disposable incomes come from). Nobody is better at wasting money than Americans, they're thrilled to do it, you can tell judging by how they so willingly vaporize their disposable income on consumer garbage. And US plans typically have plenty of data with them these days, whereas Canada gets the worst of both outcomes (terrible data packages and very high prices). People come on HN and say things like: well I'm in Latvia and I pay €12 and get unlimited data. Well yeah, adjust that to the US and it's €48 (~$56). Now you've got a T-Mobile plan in the US at that price, so what. Or someone will say I'm in Britain and I pay £25; yeah that's not cheap either, that's about $50x when you adjust it to the US for USD and incomes.
- ne0flex 5y ago
  From my understanding, there are varying reasons ranging from monopoly, to having a relatively small population spread across a large area. There is one thing to note is that there are similar observations for other market segments like cars. People will pay up to 20% more for the same car in Canada vs. the US. I remember when I lived in Canada I saw multiple news segments with the gov't getting angry that Canadians were going to the US to buy new cars in order to save money. During one news segment, the Canadian car dealer being interviewed replied with "Canadians are just willing to pay more," when asked why cars are more expensive in Canada.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  It is due to the way it is calculated. > "Prices were collected from the operator with the largest marketshare in the country, using the least expensive plan with a (minimum) data allowance of 500 MB over (a minimum of) 30 days. Prices include taxes. Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios." I disagree that it is necessarily the "best case" but it is a sensible way to count. Depending on the specific offering you may get unexpected results. For example, the 500MB plan may be barely cheaper than a 10GB plan, which can make sense if with that 500MB you are mostly paying for phone calls and SMS. Heavy internet users will most likely pick a plan with much more data that will be more expensive per month, but way cheaper per byte. Also, it is split into two section: prepaid and postpaid, and Canada is at $0.07 postpaid. They just picked the highest number on the list.
  - greenshackle2 5y ago
    Their methodology appears to be garbage. You have it backwards. The chart says $0.17 postpaid, $0.07 prepaid. The chart implies a cost of 120 USD per GB, which implies it's based on a 500MB/month plan costing 60 USD. There's no way in hell the cheapest way to get 500MB in Canada costs 60 USD. I'm in Canada and I pay 40 USD for 8GB per month. The only way I figure they can get to such an absurd number is that no one sells 500MB plans in Canada anymore, so they had to choose a zero data plan + 500MB of additional data to make up a "500MB" plan. With my carrier, additional data is 104 USD per GB.
omegabravo 5y ago
Hugged to death (for me). It took a few cracks to get this screenshot. https://imgur.com/a/9QlY5xt https://imgur.com/a/9QlY5xt
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20210707105923/https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/test/210707_AiDc36_6f01cdff93b8299725303f88e60febbc http://web.archive.org/web/20210707105923/https://whatdoesmy...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
viraptor 5y ago
So... from a really quick search I'm guessing there's more to the story in practice. Knowing nothing about Canadian carriers, I went to https://www.whistleout.ca/CellPhones/Guides/best-cell-phone-plans https://www.whistleout.ca/CellPhones/Guides/best-cell-phone-... and saw a 1G/$23 plan. That gives $0.022 / MB = $0.03 for Reddit, so much less than $0.17. Is it the choice of the largest carrier that breaks the comparison in Canada's case? Or am I missing something else?
- OJFord 5y ago
  Probably - I don't know which is the largest by marketshare but just tried a couple big enough I've heard of (I'm British) - Bell starts at $80, ok for 30GB sure, but still that's an insane starting point to me; Rogers also starts at $80, for 15GB or currently 30GB on offer. How many people even need that much? In the UK I would guess most people are on 1-3GB plans; these cost <£10pcm. Edit: or maybe I'm horribly out of touch? In the age of TikChat and Snapstagram, maybe most people (shudders) need 'unlimited'/lots more than that?
  - fckthisguy 5y ago
    I've had an (truly) unlimited plan in the UK for less than 25£ for about a decade now. The <20£ plans often have caps but it's not so much more for unlimited.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Yeah, I know they're available, I just don't think most people need/have them. (Modulo my edit that I might be extremely out of touch because I don't have any desire to.. I don't know, watch short clips of funny dances or whatever while out and about.) The killer in Canada (at least, from the big two providers I checked above) seems to be that low-limit plans aren't available. They start at 30GB, and charge roughly double.
      - salamandersauce 5y ago
        There is low limit plans, just only on the sub-brands of the big 3. They all operate multiple MVNOs with a low-end tier like Lucky Mobile and Public Mobile, a mid-tier brand like Virgin (in Canada completely run by Bell Canada, only license name and logo), Fido and Koodo. These cheaper brands have cheaper plans like 5GB for $50 or 1GB for $25. But they are also artificially locked out on features. You can't have an Apple Watch on the low end brands, there's no visual voice-mail support, no RCS, etc. Phone choice is limited although that's less of an issue than it was.
mojuba 5y ago
I wonder if the price of mobile data per megabyte depends on the population density and larger metropolitan areas vs. rural. I.e. the higher the density the cheaper. At least intuitively should be the case, because otherwise why would the prices vary so widely?
- fckthisguy 5y ago
  Lack of local competition.
hcoura 5y ago
Interesting way to put this data, but it’s outright wrong in most cases in day to day life. The plans most people purchase has much better Data/$ ratio. And this conclusion is the opposite: > Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios. They are the worst case scenarios at the very least in Brazil where I have purchased such packages
- lobocinza 5y ago
  I get the cheaper combo plan of the provider with best local coverage and very rarely exceed my quota. Most of the time I use less than 25% of it. I'm on Brazil. Can't speak for everyone but I see similar cases distorting the data.
mjlee 5y ago
The methodology is a bit odd. As best as I can tell it looks at the cheapest data plan that offers >500MB. If there's a plan that's $1 more per month but offers 100GB of data, the price per visit would drop rapidly but this tradeoff wouldn't be reflected in their price. They say it's "best case" but that appears to be based on the minimum hurdle to get a data plan, rather than the minimum data price. I think a better measurement would be a range based on a few different price levels (cheapest/most expensive/modal) but I understand that would be much harder to implement.
- viraptor 5y ago
  I honestly can't tell if the "least expensive plan" combined with "best case scenario" actually means the lowest total price, or least expensive per MB. I agree that it's either odd methodology or odd wording.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  A more representative figure would be to look at the typical data plans actual citizens of those countries have. Eg. Ask 100 citizens how many gb's they have and how much they pay. Calculate cost per gb for each. Take median.
docdeek 5y ago
I imagine this assumes you pay for a certain amount of data each month? The standard plan I have here in France has unlimited 4G and 5G data and costs me 15 euros a month (I also use them for the home/office internet for 40 euros a month so it is 15 instead of 20 euros for the cell). The cost of visiting a site on moibile under such a plan is essentially zero.
- malobre 5y ago
  I think I have the same plan as you (Free 10G-EPON + 5G ?), I've seen lots of posts about broadband / mobile subscription and while prices do seems a bit higher than in Europe what shocks me the most is data caps on home internet.
  - docdeek 5y ago
    You’re right - the home internet caps are really unbelievable. It’s hard for me to imagine having to think about whether I should be streaming Netflix in the last week of the month in case I ‘go over’ my limit. The Free Mobile team email me every couple of years to tell me that my mobile 50GB limit has gone up to 100GB and then transformed into unlimited data. I don’t think I’ve ever gone over about 40GB on mobile, anyway, and a lot less than that in the pandemic - but good to know I don’t have to think about it.
uyt 5y ago
I am in the US and I feel like most people have unlimited data. I am atypical and have Google Fi so I pay 10 dollars per gb. So 1.39mb would be $0.0139 for me. Are Canadians really paying 10x my rate?
- londons_explore 5y ago
  In the US, even plans with limited data seem to just cap you at 64kbps when you go over the limit. Thats still very usable for messaging people. In most of the rest of the world, when you run out of data the only website you can access is your bank to make another payment to the phone company...
  - coding123 5y ago
    I keep hearing that, but what country over a million people do you have limited internet at home?
dewey 5y ago
In case you are wondering why that's the case: https://cansumer.ca/canada-phone-plan-pricing/ https://cansumer.ca/canada-phone-plan-pricing/ > The Big 3 Canadian telecom companies (Bell, Rogers and Telus) own 90% of the market and charge higher prices due to a lack of competition.
- 988747 5y ago
  In Poland we have 4 big telecoms and they compete like crazy with each other. I can't see why having 3 would be any different.
  - stavros 5y ago
    Because of cartels.
  - fckthisguy 5y ago
    In this case, I think they have an established status quo, with different providers being the clear winner in certain markets, so they don't compete directly. At least, not very much.
    - cunthorpe 5y ago
      No, it's because telcos cartels are illegal in Europe and there are actual consequences. European telcos are no saints at all but they occasionally get fined and things are a little better for a few years. Just as an example, many tried to shorten the "month" to 28 days and they got a combined €228M fine in early 2020: https://www.repubblica.it/economia/2020/01/31/news/bollette_a_28_giorni_multa_da_228_milioni_di_euro_dell_antitrust_alle_compagnie-247267509/ https://www.repubblica.it/economia/2020/01/31/news/bollette_... €228M for essentially a 7% hike in pricing.
    - bobiny 5y ago
      I think that's what antimonopoly laws are for. As a Russia citizen, mobile and internet prices in supposedly more technologically advanced countries just blow my mind.
  - 5y ago
oefrha 5y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20210707105923/https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/test/210707_AiDc36_6f01cdff93b8299725303f88e60febbc https://web.archive.org/web/20210707105923/https://whatdoesm... (posted another user, I can't load the site) Out of the countries listed, I only have recent experience with the U.S. It says $0.09 for 1.39MB using "the least expensive plan with a minimum data allowance of 500MB over a minimum of 30 days". That works out to $30.6-$34.2 for a 500MB plan. I'd say the pricing data is several years out of date.
wccrawford 5y ago
> https://www.reddit.com https://www.reddit.com weighs 1.39MB. Google Fi (in the US, at least) is $10/GB. So 1000mb is $10, or $.01 per mb. It'd be only $.0139 on Fi. That's quite a huge difference. The chart even says that US data would be $.09 which is still hugely different. It claims to use the cheapest plan from the dominant carrier in the country. That doesn't mean that everyone is getting screwed like this, just most people. They say they get the prices from ITU, but I don't know where on ITU they found that data, but I feel like maybe something is being used wrong.
- timvdalen 5y ago
  I can't imagine paying $10/GB for data, wow! For reference, I'm paying about $23/month for unlimited everything in NL. I'm pretty sure that's not even the cheapest plan you could get, I just haven't switched providers in a couple of years.
  - flixic 5y ago
    Lithuania, around €10/month for everything unlimited. Granted, we have some of the cheapest mobile plans in Europe, but I just can't imagine paying my entire plan's price just for 1 GB.
  - neom 5y ago
    Cell phone plans in Canada are a joke. I pay around $80CAD a month and I get 10gig data, no ability to buy more once I run out either (only my carrier does this though, most you can buy per gig after you run out, but it's extremely expensive) - It's cheaper and better for me to get an ATT sim from the US and use it in Canada (and that's indeed what i've done).
    - FractalParadigm 5y ago
      I've got a Rogers 50GB 'Unlimited' plan, with the phone financing I'm paying just north of $175/mo - when you approx the 'max-speed limit' they send you a text offering 3GB for $10, or 10GB for $30, just reply A or B and it'll automatically go on your plan on your month. There's no limit to the number of times you can do this, but it's a little sickening paying that much money for such little data.
arcadeparade 5y ago
should be increased to $100
jokoon 5y ago
Curious to see how much of this homepage is thumbnails, how much html, how much js...
sdflhasjd 5y ago
The site is ~~wrong~~ somewhat correct about how big reddits homepage is. ~~It seems to not run any scripts when testing, so 1.5MB is the basic JS + CSS.~~ In reality, it's much, much worse. (On a desktop) Even with an adblocker, reddit.com downloaded 18MB in the first 10 seconds. That would put that cost at over $1. I stopped after that because it seemed to be just continuously downloading... something. I know Reddit is quite media driven these days, but it seems to be unnecessary prefetching a lot Edit: Looks like I was testing the desktop version, see jefftk's reply. However, it doesn't help reddit's case that much. After looking into what it's actually downloading in my "desktop" test, there are lots of huge PNG images (1000x1000 +) that seem to be displayed as tiny thumbnails. And for an infinitely scrolling page, it prefetches all the images in the feed at full resolution. If I turn off my adblocker, I get an autoplaying amazon ad (~5MB). Additionally, it starts auto-playing a livestreams which is just below the fold.
- fhsm 5y ago
  Wow. That's a lot. I'm not sure how to replicate this but I would be curious what old.reddit.com does via an equivalent methodology.
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    Firefox dev tools said ~1.3MB transferred. I think it's the increased number of thumbnails per "page", even though they're smaller. On the other hand it has no autoplaying videos and livestreams.
- jefftk 5y ago
  > It seems to not run any scripts when testing They source their claim to a WebPageTest run [1], and WPT does run scripts. I can reproduce their results as: 1. Open an incognito window in Chrome 2. Open devtools, and configure it as mobile 3. Navigate to reddit.com 4. See ~1.5MB transferred [1] https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_AiDc36_6f01cdff93b8299725303f88e60febbc/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1 https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_AiDc36_6f01cdff93b...
  - 5y ago
danbruc 5y ago
For Germany it says 0.07 USD prepaid for 1.39 MB which is 50 USD for 1 GB. Telekom offers 2 GB for 9.95 EUR prepaid which yields 0.0082 USD and is an order of magnitude lower than the quoted number. And this is literally the first offering I looked at, the second provider I looked at offers 12 GB for 15.99 EUR which brings the number down to 0.0022 EUR. I would take those numbers with a large grain of salt at the very least.
- Vahkesh 5y ago
  Agreed, I'm trying to figure out where this site is getting their pricing data.
  - herbst 5y ago
    I assume its something like numbeo. Thing is with this kind of data there is always a local and a tourist price. In many countries (especially Europe) you can not always buy a prepaid SIM card with a foreign passport (without extra hoops at least) or you need a real residence address. So these prices often reflect the few options that are (visibly) available for tourists.
    - Anderkent 5y ago
      I've never had an issue with a foreign passport buying a SIM. You usually need a local address but you can just use your hotels.
      - herbst 5y ago
        I usually did not either. However Netherlands and Germany have been an exception. In the Netherlands every mobile provider shoo me out of their shop refering to yallo or libera. I had an apartment and was staying 2 months, so this wasn't the issue. And Germany was essentially the same except I only tried with 3 or so providers. Most tourists still pick one of the shitty providers available at the airport or train station and go with that. Some of them provide a faster verification do you can walk out having internet, in Austria if you buy internet at a supermarket (it's uncomplicated there) it can take a few hours to verify. Or Italy, if you arrive in Venedig you find ads for internet packages everywhere. I actually needed to go to the mainland to buy a a normal SIM. As no one on the island acknowledged the cheaper packages available. My point is, it's complicated Source: I've spent months (if not years) with my laptop In Europe and Asia and internet always was the #1 priority. I also do not know if things are better today
swiley 5y ago
More disturbing than mobile prices in Canada is electricity prices in Africa IMO. I heard a while ago that people are actually trading sex for access to generator power. This means on that continent at least unneeded JS in web pages is literally AIDS.
MarkusWandel 5y ago
I've gone the opposite direction (here in Canada). I'm on a plan that costs at most $13 (+HST) per month but can get cheaper. It gives me unlimited international text/multimedia messaging, 100 dialed minutes / unlimited incoming minutes per month and 250MB of data. Pathetic? Sure. But just don't use mobile data unless you need it. 250MB is enough for data plan based messaging, Strava, Google Maps (with cached maps) and whatever information you need to look up. You don't really need to watch 1080p streaming video outside the house. If anything this actually encourages healthy phone habits. If you do need massive data, suck it up, pay the CAD $80/month for the big data package, then the incremental cost of visiting a given web site is zero. Cheaper? Look it up. It's Public Mobile prepaid. $15/month minus $2 for autopay (which everyone uses), minus $1/month for every year you've been on to a maximum of 5, minus $1/month for every referred friend (or spouse!) that is currently using it. I think the wife and I together are running at $21 or $22 per month currently. Yes, would be nice to have dirt cheap internet and mobile data, but we don't. So make the best of what we do have.
- deregulateMed 5y ago
  It's interesting to see the rationalization. "Just don't use it, plus good phone habits" What about value added uses for the phone? I looked up how to harvest basil today and watched a 60 second YouTube video. Or reading an encyclopedia. Or fixing a car. None of those are bad phone habits. And those previously mentioned don't necessarily have the luxury of wifi.
  - MarkusWandel 5y ago
    I have a gigabyte of backup data for stuff like that; it costs $30 but you can use it up as slowly as you want (once you deplete your 250MB). I find it super annoying that low bandwidth information (i.e. a paragraph or two of text) has been replaced by ad-riddled Youtube videos! I've been able to avoid this usage pattern while on mobile data, but I can see that not everyone feels they can. Wikipedia is lightweight, no problem on frugal data.
  - TMWNN 5y ago
    >It's interesting to see the rationalization. >"Just don't use it, plus good phone habits" Agreed. For a couple of years I had 1-5GB mobile plans, often free (thanks to the late great RingPlus). I never used more than 1-2GB a month so they were quite sufficient for my needs. I then got unlimited service from Sprint (thanks to the late great free unlimited year offer). My usage patterns did not change. To my surprise, however, I found that no longer having to think about the usage limit—even if the limit was never a real problem before—perceptibly eased my daily life.
NoblePublius 5y ago
I pay $30/month for unlimited everything (including HotSpot) on Visible (Verizon MVNO) in NYC.
davidkunz 5y ago
You can replace reddit.com with teddit.net and have a much lighter UI.
- techrat 5y ago
  ...and far less data collection, dark patterns, and helps to eliminate the temptation to soil ones' self by responding to the horrendous comments on that site. At this point, Reddit is just Facebook for people who think they're too good to use Facebook.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
At this point in history, I thought certain webites would be paying consumers to visit their site. Yes--literally paying us to view in credits, paypal, or bitcoin. It wold be nice to see Facebook offering a few pennies for the marketing data we pay to give them. It would be nice to be paid for high ranking comments too. Say for instance, a guy writes a researched answer to a question on Reddit, and it blew up. Reddit would pay pay that individual a few dimes. The quality of comments would probally increase? Maybe less bathroom humor, and real thoughtful answers? Could anyone imagine if we got a bill at the end of the month detailing what we pay per website/download incident? You went to facebook 40 times, at a bandwidth, or percentage you pay us, at a cost of $6.00 You went to Reddit 30 times, at a cost of $3.00 (It will never happen because the big players are becoming very good Lobbiest's. If it ever did happen, I can guarantee, there would be no bloat. If it ever did happpen, it might redispute some if the obsence profits these guys hide? I still think most people would cheerily contribute to sites they respect without any form of enticement.)
yipbub 5y ago
I'm very surprised at how much data costs in Canada. In India, it costs me 7.43 USD for 84 days of 1.5GiB high-speed 4g data per day (plus unlimited calling). After that it drops of to a lower speed, but you can top off cheaply. That's $0.058 per GiB or $0.00005 per MiB
- neom 5y ago
  Canada 204% larger than India with a fraction of the population. Unfortunately everything is overpriced here.
  - Karsteski 5y ago
    This comparison never makes sense. A large percentage of Canada lives within 100km of the US border.
TenToedTony 5y ago
WTF. You buy a fixed amount of data in Canada?
- Black101 5y ago
  Often in the US too and unlimited usually doesn't mean unlimited at full speed... For example, if you use your internet at full speed for a full day, you probably would get throttled for the rest of the month.
  - TenToedTony 5y ago
    That's crazy. Unlimited here is uncapped speeds with a soft fair use download ceiling of 1TB a month (last I checked, which is quite a while ago). If you surpass that repeatedly you're asked to tone it down, and if you continue to download that much, you'll have to pay more for a higher cap.
DSingularity 5y ago
Canadians are unhappy but maybe in ten years they will be happy with a population whose minds remained healthy because bandwidth costs luckily created a controlling feedback mechanism to otherwise addictive social media.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
Brutal. I'm on Mint which costs something like $240 a year for 2x 10GB plans. But they don't cut you off or charge you more if you go over. They just throttle you a bit more during congestion events. It costs me less than a cent to visit reddit, under the pessimistic assumption that they throttle me to zero after I use my 10GB.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >I'm on Mint which costs something like $240 a year for 2x 10GB plans. But they don't cut you off or charge you more if you go over. Further, I bet that 10GB is effectively equivalent to unlimited for 90% of people.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    It is at least for me. I never use more than a GB.
dcolkitt 5y ago
This always seemed like a back door way to finally have the web finally embrace a micropayments business model. By this point ads, and the tracking scripts associated with ad networks, have grown so large that they may cost more in bandwidth than they generate in sales. People are famously hesitant to pay for content, but in this case it’s “free” if it means dumping the ads.
christophilus 5y ago
i.reddit.com for the win! Really, though, I’m part of the problem. The product I’m working on is a heavy JavaScript-based content editor. It’s definitely a much better UX than the lighter weight previous version. But we made the user-facing content pages Preact-based simply to keep our stack consistent. We’re a small team, and that’s been a real time saver. Hopefully, we’ll get around to optimizing things in the future, but it’s not something anyone other than the dev team cares about.
Communitivity 5y ago
So happy I have my grandfathered unlimited Verizon. I know I'll lose that when I move to 5G, based on what I'm seeing. Enjoying it for now though. I am excited to see the number of free municipal wi-fi growing [1], though none are near me yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_wireless_network#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_wireless_network#Uni...
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >So happy I have my grandfathered unlimited Verizon. I know I'll lose that when I move to 5G, based on what I'm seeing. By "unlimited" you mean an unlimited plan that does not throttle/deprioritize after ~50GB of usage, right? I pay $23 a month for two Sprint unlimited lines, but both deprioritize after 50GB (although I think I only exceeded 10GB a month once for unusual circumstances, and I hear that in many places deprioritization never happens anyway). On the other hand, there is no obstacle to my purchasing and swapping in a 5G phone on those lines.
caymanjim 5y ago
The article won't load for me, so I'm not sure if this is about reddit.com in a browser, or the Reddit mobile app. Sounds like the browser, based on other comments. They intentionally make the browser experience as terrible as possible to force people into the app (not that the app is much better). Reddit is hostile to their users and doesn't care about usability.
busymom0 5y ago
I realize this is more of an indictment on how crazy expensive data is in Canada but I would like to mention that the "redesigned" Reddit is so bloated, even my i5 Mac mini from last year struggles. And other than the bloat, they also added extra unnecessary white space to make you scroll more (and thus shove move ads in). Also the continuous popups in mobile browser to "Open in official app" is very use hostile. They basically ruined their site on purpose to make users go to their app instead as most apps can't have ad blockers unless you use PiHole or something. If I really need to, I use unofficial Apollo to view Reddit. But other than that, I have pretty much stopped visiting the site.
- jcims 5y ago
  Every time I wind up on the site without going to old.reddit.com, I get frustrated first but then I become enthralled that the site has been completely broken for years now. I know there are folks that defend it and possibly enjoy it, but I think they have somehow built the muscle memory to not fuck up and accidentally look the wrong way while browsing.
Traster 5y ago
I don't know about other countries, but in the UK doing this: > using the least expensive plan with a (minimum) data allowance of 500 MB over (a minimum of) 30 days Is just rubbish. It's just impossible to price things like this, take EE's pricing per GB for a 1 month sim: * 1GB - £14 - £14 per GB * 120GB - £20 - £0.16p per GB * 10GB - £20 - £2 per GB * 200GB - £23 - $0.115p per GB * Unlimited - £35 The total price of the cheapest contract is £6 cheaper than the next step up, which is 100 times cheaper per GB.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Why is 120GB the same price as 10GB?
  - Traster 5y ago
    Because our phone companies are 99.97% marketing. They're constantly trying to market deals and segment their market. So today it just so happens to be 120GB cheap. Next week it might be extortionately expensive. When 5G first came out it was ridiculously expensive to get decent data caps, but I would assume that they now have excess capacity and so they're trying to compete with some other competitor at that price point.
    - swiley 5y ago
      They're also trying to break their old no-longer-economical contracts.
Aeolun 5y ago
How is the least expensive plan the best case scenario. The prices go down significantly per MB on larger plans.
vincengomes 5y ago
There is a small mistake in the results. Its Hong Kong not Honk Kong
phr4ts 5y ago
Use this to automatically redirect to the old.reddit version https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
mmacvicarprett 5y ago
The cost numbers does not make any sense for me, you get 8gb for 10 usd in Brazil postpaid, around 3 times lower than the prices used.
f6v 5y ago
My iPad(it’s a 9.7 one, but anyway) suffocates when I visit Reddit. The same device that runs heavy 3D games. Something is definitely wrong.
- pugworthy 5y ago
  Perhaps with your iPad? Your iPad's internet connection?
Black101 5y ago
They could easily reduce that... For example, they use 48x48 images for images that are displayed at 12x12 pixels... https://i.imgur.com/nMXLd4H.png https://i.imgur.com/nMXLd4H.png
- travisporter 5y ago
  Not being a web dev, i'm curious why PNGs are used at all? I assumed jpeg would be smaller almost always
everdrive 5y ago
Maybe it'd be good if more people had to pay for data? Website owners might actually try to optimize their sites rather than constantly making them worse.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
This is BS, it states 3 cents for France, but most people have unlimited plans for 20 euros here.
Iv 5y ago
old.reddit.com is the only way to browse that site. I really don't think I will be able to stay the day they pull the plug on the old version.
NelsonMinar 5y ago
And you pay all that and then the page is covered with a giant modal dialog trying to force you to use the mobile app instead of your web browser.
Causality1 5y ago
because this is the least expensive plan it is the best case scenario That is a wildly incorrect claim. The only people I know on limited data plans are elderly. Everyone else is either on a cheap, slow unlimited plan or an expensive, fast unlimited plan. Even if I count my deprioritization quota of 22GB as my "limit" visiting Reddit only costs me 0.16 cents.
theknocker 5y ago
Reddit is the worst thing to happen to the internet besides google.
pmarreck 5y ago
Does anyone else just use old.reddit.com since the (now no longer new) site redesign is so awful?
- Joe_Cool 5y ago
  Yes! On older PCs and netbooks the new site is an absolute pain to use with massive lag and CPU usage.
- rnhmjoj 5y ago
  You should also try teddit.net: it's a minimal self-hosted frontend (similar to indivious and nitter). I think it's even better than the old design and works well without javascript.
makecheck 5y ago
Given all the other things Reddit does, it seems to me this could just be another part of the “ruin the web to push the app” strategy.
- techrat 5y ago
  Even their mobile site and app has become more hostile and laden with dark patterns. At this point, I can't even treat Reddit like a collection of community forums anymore... They make it impossible to read a thread when you come in from a Google result (unless you know the cheat code, change www in the url to old) and their content filtering is something out of a dystopian novel written by a schizophrenic bot. Trying to find any specific piece of info? Good luck.
  - postalrat 5y ago
    I always assumed the push to the app was to give them more control to push whatever content they want down your throat.
api 5y ago
As soon as Reddit turns off old.reddit.com I will never return. Their now years old redesign is just horrible. It's bloated, information poor, and has totally ruined the site.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
we're all working from home, no one's using mobile data /s
dwild 5y ago
Their data is so wrong. Fizz for example is for Quebec subscriber only (but offer coverage over the whole country). It's still quite expansive per GB if you get the smallest amount of data, but still you would get for 16$ CAD per month for a 1 GB mobile plan. That means 0.0178$, which is an order of magnitude cheaper than what they said. I don't know how they got their price, that's really not clear from their page. Canada is a HUGE country, there's not a single provider that has an unique price for the whole country. Some province get far cheaper price for many different reasons (competitive market, population density, type of users, etc...). Even the big providers doesn't keep the same price in every province.
banana_giraffe 5y ago
While it doesn't change the results by an order of magnitude, reddit.com is very different depending on who's loading it. Just playing with exit points of a VPN provider, I can get mobile website that's anywhere from 500kb to 3mb to load depending on which articles are at the top in a given region. Some regions seem to love articles with big graphics, and some seem to value text articles. Or, it could just be luck of the draw.
jedberg 5y ago
Poland is near the bottom of all these graphs (meaning cheapest) and that tracks with my anecdotal experience. When I visited Europe a few years ago, I bought a SIM card in Poland and for just a couple Euro I got 4GB of data. At the time that was significantly cheaper than my own mobile plan at home.
coding123 5y ago
Considering the second most popular website in the world sends a gigabyte per hour (youtube) is this stuff a concern anymore?
snwfog 5y ago
Deck for Reddit [1] is even worse [2]. Thanks, super useful, now I know I gotta work on some assets optimization. - [1] https://rdddeck.com https://rdddeck.com - [2] https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_AiDc8S_8ed51fd2240acaa2b5a4be48139c03ad/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1 https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_AiDc8S_8ed51fd2240...
Shadonototro 5y ago
fighting global warming starts from here, we should punish the bloat culture advocators
yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
Highly recommend this pertinent and brilliant talk from several years ago: video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U text: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
dang 5y ago
Past related threads: The cost of using different sites on mobile networks around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192503 - April 2017 (90 comments) What Does My Site Cost? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9187128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9187128 - March 2015 (1 comment)
dang 5y ago
Submitted title was "Reddit.com weighs 1.39MB. Here’s what that costs around the globe". Since this has nothing in particular to do with the ever-sensational Reddit, that counts as linkbait. (Also, "Blah blah. Here's what that blah" is a linkbait headline trope in its own right.) We've reverted the title as the site guidelines ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
alex_smart 5y ago
The $0.01 number for India is off by at least two orders of magnitude. I use a telephone plan that gives 1GB/day for 3 months for 8USD. That comes to around $0.0001 cents per MB.
RantyDave 5y ago
Bear in mind that the smallest data plan is a pathologically bad case. For instance in New Zealand 40GB is $80/mo - so almost exactly 1USD/GB. So 1.39MB is $0.00139 but is listed at $0.05.
nicbou 5y ago
Apparently, my website's heaviest page costs 0 to 1 cent. Smaller pages are a fifth of the size. It bothers me that many similar websites (i.e. text content) load 2-5 MB of data for just text on a page. Pretty much everything past the first few kilobytes are useless to the reader. These websites fall apart when you're not on a recent Macbook with a wired gigabit connection. Developers forget that people browse the web in the subway, on intercity trains and on crappy hotel/airport internet.

hakube 5y ago

I wonder how much would it cost to visit CNN

SamuelAdams 5y ago
There is lite.cnn.com for a text-only experience.

deergomoo 5y ago

I feel this is more an indictment of Canadian data prices than Reddit’s bloat. Why on Earth is it so expensive?

OJFord 5y ago
They still have intranational (i.e. cross-province, I assume) long distance call charges too.
- voisin 5y ago
  This is largely eliminated. Koodo tried to reinstate it this year and there was a backlash. Though Telus still has landline plans in BC that have long distance costs outside of your city!
lpcvoid 5y ago
No matter what the cost per MB, why is it completely normal for everybody nowadays that websites can be multiple million bytes in size? It's text after all. Boggles my mind.
- rplnt 5y ago
  Jira (ticketing system - all text) is like 30 MB on first download, most of it javascript. It also barely runs on 2017 MB Pro.
  - lpcvoid 5y ago
    I have to work with that daily, and yeah, it drives me insane.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Yes Jira is terrible, not just from a javascript point of view but usability as well. Unfortunately we have to manage our hours in it.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  Software is a gas, and our containers keep getting bigger.
- omegabravo 5y ago
  at the same time, which GUI applications on your computer are only 1.3mb? 1.3mb seems optimised to me at first glance
  - lpcvoid 5y ago
    It's possible to create GUI applications with under 10kb in size, if you link dynamically and use raw win32 api. Pretty sure that my personal wxwidget stuff was way under 100kb too back in the days. Never used GTK directly on linux, but again, 1MB is an indicator that you are either linking statically, or doing something wrong.
  - chousuke 5y ago
    How much signal is there in that 1.3MB though? We don't think about the weight of websites much nowadays because we have insane bandwidth, but how much of that is actual content? The text on one page can't be more than a few kilobytes, and images don't have to be much more data either if they're just thumbnails.
  - bscphil 5y ago
    Many of them, thanks in part to dynamic linking. (I don't think excluding DLLs is too unfair, after all the browser constitutes an enormous Javascript runtime environment.) VLC is one of the more complex programs out there, and yet the VLC binaries and the libvlc libraries they ship with total only 1.295 MiB on my computer. The main application for Scid, a chess database program, is only 1.1 MiB. (The program also comes with a simple test chess engine and some opening books, so the overall package is somewhat larger.) The binary and libraries for hexchat, an IRC application, total 1.22 MiB. The program files for Pinta, an image editing program, come in right at 1.3 MB. The vast majority of programs are under 10 MiB total. Moreover, I've tried to pick relatively full featured desktop apps, and desktop apps as a rule do more than any 1 MB web page. And these applications come in highly compressed archives, which means that their download size is often significantly less. Furthermore, I would argue that web pages are rarely comparable to applications. When you're browsing Reddit, if the home page is 1.3 MiB on mobile, chances are the first individual post you click on is also going to be 1.3 MiB, and the one after that, and so on. You don't get the benefits of Reddit by downloading an "application" one time and getting tiny updates after that. If you're lucky most of the libraries being pulled in will get cached, but frequently it doesn't work out that way. On desktop Reddit, a warm refresh of the site still used more than 2.5 MiB for me, and that's with an ad blocker enabled.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  The people who develop said sites live in a bubble where high speed computers and internet are the norm, and many of them are too young to remember when computers were actually slow, so they don't really understand how unbelievably wasteful their product is.
  - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
    “Developer experience” they chant, as they sit in cushy chairs, and post on social media in between grunt builds.
- montroser 5y ago
  Indeed. Compare to https://teddit.net https://teddit.net (no-js reddit front end), and you can see the vast difference in bandwidth and performance. Some of the cause of all this has to do with market forces and prioritizing speed of development over customer experience. But I don't think that's the whole story.
- 0xTJ 5y ago
  This is why I only use old.reddit.com. If they ever stop providing the old Reddit, I doubt I'll keep using it. Sure the old one isn't perfect, but I find the new one borderline unusable, even on a modern laptop. There's a furniture chain here that has a website so terrible, I just gave up on trying to buy what I wanted from them. So much happening in JavaScript to make things happen on the page. I have to imagine it's also terribly written, since it freezes up the tab most of the time, and Firefox suggests killing the script.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Yes it (new reddit) even brings my i5 to its knees... Way overbloated with javascript. Also in FF by the way. Perhaps Chrome is better but I won't use it.
  - decrypt 5y ago
    I relate to this a lot. reddit.com struggles to load on my MacBook Air 2015, or a Windows with 9th gen i5 with 8GB RAM. I have an extension on my Firefox to always load the old reddit. There is an account-specific setting to always load old reddit, but there are times when I browse without an account.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    It won't be around for much long I am afraid. Now to accept cookie policies you need first to accept being redirected into the new site, and then manually return to old version. I bet in about one year time the old is gone.
    - bscphil 5y ago
      I don't think I've ever been asked to accept a cookie policy on Reddit. I normally only browse Reddit while logged in, so that could be part of it. Is this a new thing?
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Yep, specially when always deleting cookies and living in Europe.
- silvestrov 5y ago
  Especially reddit which has such a simple UI that no frameworks are needed. If you drop support for MSIE 11 and only support modern browsers the modern javascript is surprisingly compact. But then your CV looks stupid: no frameworks on the list. How would you ever get a job again? How do you get any respect if you say "I just code javascript directly on the browser", sounds like you're too stupid to learn a framework. You will only get respect from the very best developers but not all the copy/paste 'developers', no respect from the HR department nor mediocre managers. It's an uphill battle.
  - deergomoo 5y ago
    Use of frameworks is often blamed for bloat, but the two are completely independent. React is about 110kB. Vue is 33kB. It's perfectly possible (and really not that hard) to write fast, small web apps with the big popular JS frameworks. It's the thoughtless stuff people do—pulling in huge libraries for tiny features, mandating the use of huge analytics packages, etc—that cause the bloat. Whether it should all just be server-rendered is a whole other argument, but if you're going to build something the size and scale of reddit as a client-rendered app, you'd be crazy to not use one of the existing frameworks IMO. If for no other reason than you're likely to end up just re-creating a worse version of them.
    - bscphil 5y ago
      I think bloat really means two different things. One is the obvious "file size" issue, and as you are mentioning it's quite possible to write small sites even using heavy-weight frameworks. But a lot of the complaints in this thread boil down to modern sites being slow to run on computers that are only a few years old. If modern frameworks are to blame for that, it's not because they're a hundred (or more) KB. It's because they require the end user to run way more Javascript in the browser and consume far more memory than a site with minimal Javascript requires to accomplish the same thing. As a random example, Firefox's about:performance page says that the three YouTube tabs I have open are each consuming about 50 MB of my computer's memory. That's obscene. (None of the tabs are open on a video, so this is not the result of storing videos in RAM.) Also, I did a Lighthouse analysis of the Reddit home page in Chrome (on Desktop, but targeting mobile). The page scores less than 20/100 on performance, and takes almost twenty seconds to become interactive!! The biggest problem Lighthouse sees with the page is not the file size, but the amount of Javascript being executed. There's ~25 seconds of "main thread work" being done in my test.
- cesarb 5y ago
  For perspective, a common high-density floppy disk is 1.4 megabytes. A whole operating system, complete with GUI, could fit in that space.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nelox 5y ago
My guess is monopolistic power at play
ricardo81 5y ago
Spent a few years living in Canada but mostly in the UK. It seemed that Canadian prices were roughly double. My anecdotal guess is that the infrastructure costs are higher in Canada due to lower population density. Lots more area to cover to achieve the same coverage.
- voisin 5y ago
  I have heard this argument and the counter is that Australia has low population density like Canada and significantly lower costs. It all comes down to competition. We Canadians love our oligopolies!
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  No. It's just utter bullshit due to a lack of competition. The province with the cheapest rates for wireless is not dense, population rich Ontario. It's one of the least dense, least populus. Why? Oh, because they have an extra wireless competitor in the form of a Crown Corp. Other countries like Australia have similar densities and infrastructure costs yet still have way lower prices. The Canadian telecom industry is sheltered and there's really only 3 big players. Foreign competition isn't allowed so there's no possibility of Verizon or Vodafone coming in and shaking things up.
  - davidy123 5y ago
    Ontario has 14 persons per square mile. The population density of ALL of Western Europe is 181, ten times greater, Netherlands is 521. Ontario is quite a bit closer to other "less dense" provinces than most countries used for comparison. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-territories-by-population-density.html#bottom https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-t... https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-population-density.html#bottom https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-po... I'm not posting enough references here, but this whole conversation has been so limited in facts and proportion. The point is the government wants carriers to provide service everywhere, which includes places like Nunavut, 0.019 persons per square mile. There are local initiatives, and some are really fantastic, but it's difficult to bootstrap those everywhere. Go to https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/fourprov.htm https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/fourprov.htm and search for Nunavut and see who comes up. These prices need to come down, more competition and local initiatives need to happen, and more innovation for systems like mesh networks. It is particularly upsetting when ways can't be found to share infrastructure. But if providing access to every Canadian is the goal (rather than for every person in a city at a cost less than a bag of groceries) there is probably some logic to the existing system. Some people will say "just pay for Starlink everywhere," but it's really not ok for a country's access to be owned by another country (as long as Musk is still on earth), wired ultimately has advantages, and there are probably benefits to supporting wired infrastructure, and competition and choice are important.
shadowfaxRodeo 5y ago
To put it in perspective, the average website costs $0.12 in Canada. Both an indictment of general bloat and Canada data prices. More interesting is how much it costs for people in poorer countries — Where the absolute value of visiting a site is less, but relative to income is far greater. Understandably you don't see much about this online — people with expensive data plans don't use it all up complaining about it online.
- cube2222 5y ago
  Poorer countries (let's say those in the middle) quite often have newer network infrastructure, so prices are actually much better, even relative to income. In Poland it's around 0.25$ per GB for mobile networks. So 1MB is 0.00025$ and a visit to reddit according to the above calculations would be 0.0003475$. The prices in the US and Canada are ridiculous from that perspective.
  - shadowfaxRodeo 5y ago
    I should have said, some specific poorer countries. India has incredibly cheap data. While Mauritania has the most expensive in the world compared with the average income.
  - adventured 5y ago
    > The prices in the US and Canada are ridiculous from that perspective. The prices in the US aren't actually a serious problem any longer (they were if you go back 10 years, before T-Mobile's climb changed the market). Americans can trivially afford it given their disposable incomes at the median are among the highest on the planet. US plan prices have declined over the past ten years in nominal terms, while inflation has eroded another 30% of the price. $50-$60 is a nearly meaningless part of the average person's monthly budget in the US now (the median full-time income is $50,000, and Americans have low taxes at the median, which is where the high disposable incomes come from). Nobody is better at wasting money than Americans, they're thrilled to do it, you can tell judging by how they so willingly vaporize their disposable income on consumer garbage. And US plans typically have plenty of data with them these days, whereas Canada gets the worst of both outcomes (terrible data packages and very high prices). People come on HN and say things like: well I'm in Latvia and I pay €12 and get unlimited data. Well yeah, adjust that to the US and it's €48 (~$56). Now you've got a T-Mobile plan in the US at that price, so what. Or someone will say I'm in Britain and I pay £25; yeah that's not cheap either, that's about $50x when you adjust it to the US for USD and incomes.
ne0flex 5y ago
From my understanding, there are varying reasons ranging from monopoly, to having a relatively small population spread across a large area. There is one thing to note is that there are similar observations for other market segments like cars. People will pay up to 20% more for the same car in Canada vs. the US. I remember when I lived in Canada I saw multiple news segments with the gov't getting angry that Canadians were going to the US to buy new cars in order to save money. During one news segment, the Canadian car dealer being interviewed replied with "Canadians are just willing to pay more," when asked why cars are more expensive in Canada.
GuB-42 5y ago
It is due to the way it is calculated. > "Prices were collected from the operator with the largest marketshare in the country, using the least expensive plan with a (minimum) data allowance of 500 MB over (a minimum of) 30 days. Prices include taxes. Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios." I disagree that it is necessarily the "best case" but it is a sensible way to count. Depending on the specific offering you may get unexpected results. For example, the 500MB plan may be barely cheaper than a 10GB plan, which can make sense if with that 500MB you are mostly paying for phone calls and SMS. Heavy internet users will most likely pick a plan with much more data that will be more expensive per month, but way cheaper per byte. Also, it is split into two section: prepaid and postpaid, and Canada is at $0.07 postpaid. They just picked the highest number on the list.
- greenshackle2 5y ago
  Their methodology appears to be garbage. You have it backwards. The chart says $0.17 postpaid, $0.07 prepaid. The chart implies a cost of 120 USD per GB, which implies it's based on a 500MB/month plan costing 60 USD. There's no way in hell the cheapest way to get 500MB in Canada costs 60 USD. I'm in Canada and I pay 40 USD for 8GB per month. The only way I figure they can get to such an absurd number is that no one sells 500MB plans in Canada anymore, so they had to choose a zero data plan + 500MB of additional data to make up a "500MB" plan. With my carrier, additional data is 104 USD per GB.

omegabravo 5y ago

Hugged to death (for me). It took a few cracks to get this screenshot. https://imgur.com/a/9QlY5xt https://imgur.com/a/9QlY5xt

5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20210707105923/https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/test/210707_AiDc36_6f01cdff93b8299725303f88e60febbc http://web.archive.org/web/20210707105923/https://whatdoesmy...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

viraptor 5y ago

So... from a really quick search I'm guessing there's more to the story in practice. Knowing nothing about Canadian carriers, I went to https://www.whistleout.ca/CellPhones/Guides/best-cell-phone-plans https://www.whistleout.ca/CellPhones/Guides/best-cell-phone-... and saw a 1G/$23 plan. That gives $0.022 / MB = $0.03 for Reddit, so much less than $0.17. Is it the choice of the largest carrier that breaks the comparison in Canada's case? Or am I missing something else?

OJFord 5y ago
Probably - I don't know which is the largest by marketshare but just tried a couple big enough I've heard of (I'm British) - Bell starts at $80, ok for 30GB sure, but still that's an insane starting point to me; Rogers also starts at $80, for 15GB or currently 30GB on offer. How many people even need that much? In the UK I would guess most people are on 1-3GB plans; these cost <£10pcm. Edit: or maybe I'm horribly out of touch? In the age of TikChat and Snapstagram, maybe most people (shudders) need 'unlimited'/lots more than that?
- fckthisguy 5y ago
  I've had an (truly) unlimited plan in the UK for less than 25£ for about a decade now. The <20£ plans often have caps but it's not so much more for unlimited.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Yeah, I know they're available, I just don't think most people need/have them. (Modulo my edit that I might be extremely out of touch because I don't have any desire to.. I don't know, watch short clips of funny dances or whatever while out and about.) The killer in Canada (at least, from the big two providers I checked above) seems to be that low-limit plans aren't available. They start at 30GB, and charge roughly double.
    - salamandersauce 5y ago
      There is low limit plans, just only on the sub-brands of the big 3. They all operate multiple MVNOs with a low-end tier like Lucky Mobile and Public Mobile, a mid-tier brand like Virgin (in Canada completely run by Bell Canada, only license name and logo), Fido and Koodo. These cheaper brands have cheaper plans like 5GB for $50 or 1GB for $25. But they are also artificially locked out on features. You can't have an Apple Watch on the low end brands, there's no visual voice-mail support, no RCS, etc. Phone choice is limited although that's less of an issue than it was.

mojuba 5y ago

I wonder if the price of mobile data per megabyte depends on the population density and larger metropolitan areas vs. rural. I.e. the higher the density the cheaper. At least intuitively should be the case, because otherwise why would the prices vary so widely?

fckthisguy 5y ago
Lack of local competition.

hcoura 5y ago

Interesting way to put this data, but it’s outright wrong in most cases in day to day life. The plans most people purchase has much better Data/$ ratio. And this conclusion is the opposite: > Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios. They are the worst case scenarios at the very least in Brazil where I have purchased such packages

lobocinza 5y ago
I get the cheaper combo plan of the provider with best local coverage and very rarely exceed my quota. Most of the time I use less than 25% of it. I'm on Brazil. Can't speak for everyone but I see similar cases distorting the data.

mjlee 5y ago

The methodology is a bit odd. As best as I can tell it looks at the cheapest data plan that offers >500MB. If there's a plan that's $1 more per month but offers 100GB of data, the price per visit would drop rapidly but this tradeoff wouldn't be reflected in their price. They say it's "best case" but that appears to be based on the minimum hurdle to get a data plan, rather than the minimum data price. I think a better measurement would be a range based on a few different price levels (cheapest/most expensive/modal) but I understand that would be much harder to implement.

viraptor 5y ago
I honestly can't tell if the "least expensive plan" combined with "best case scenario" actually means the lowest total price, or least expensive per MB. I agree that it's either odd methodology or odd wording.
londons_explore 5y ago
A more representative figure would be to look at the typical data plans actual citizens of those countries have. Eg. Ask 100 citizens how many gb's they have and how much they pay. Calculate cost per gb for each. Take median.

docdeek 5y ago

I imagine this assumes you pay for a certain amount of data each month? The standard plan I have here in France has unlimited 4G and 5G data and costs me 15 euros a month (I also use them for the home/office internet for 40 euros a month so it is 15 instead of 20 euros for the cell). The cost of visiting a site on moibile under such a plan is essentially zero.

malobre 5y ago
I think I have the same plan as you (Free 10G-EPON + 5G ?), I've seen lots of posts about broadband / mobile subscription and while prices do seems a bit higher than in Europe what shocks me the most is data caps on home internet.
- docdeek 5y ago
  You’re right - the home internet caps are really unbelievable. It’s hard for me to imagine having to think about whether I should be streaming Netflix in the last week of the month in case I ‘go over’ my limit. The Free Mobile team email me every couple of years to tell me that my mobile 50GB limit has gone up to 100GB and then transformed into unlimited data. I don’t think I’ve ever gone over about 40GB on mobile, anyway, and a lot less than that in the pandemic - but good to know I don’t have to think about it.

uyt 5y ago

I am in the US and I feel like most people have unlimited data. I am atypical and have Google Fi so I pay 10 dollars per gb. So 1.39mb would be $0.0139 for me. Are Canadians really paying 10x my rate?

londons_explore 5y ago
In the US, even plans with limited data seem to just cap you at 64kbps when you go over the limit. Thats still very usable for messaging people. In most of the rest of the world, when you run out of data the only website you can access is your bank to make another payment to the phone company...
- coding123 5y ago
  I keep hearing that, but what country over a million people do you have limited internet at home?

dewey 5y ago

In case you are wondering why that's the case: https://cansumer.ca/canada-phone-plan-pricing/ https://cansumer.ca/canada-phone-plan-pricing/ > The Big 3 Canadian telecom companies (Bell, Rogers and Telus) own 90% of the market and charge higher prices due to a lack of competition.

988747 5y ago
In Poland we have 4 big telecoms and they compete like crazy with each other. I can't see why having 3 would be any different.
- stavros 5y ago
  Because of cartels.
- fckthisguy 5y ago
  In this case, I think they have an established status quo, with different providers being the clear winner in certain markets, so they don't compete directly. At least, not very much.
  - cunthorpe 5y ago
    No, it's because telcos cartels are illegal in Europe and there are actual consequences. European telcos are no saints at all but they occasionally get fined and things are a little better for a few years. Just as an example, many tried to shorten the "month" to 28 days and they got a combined €228M fine in early 2020: https://www.repubblica.it/economia/2020/01/31/news/bollette_a_28_giorni_multa_da_228_milioni_di_euro_dell_antitrust_alle_compagnie-247267509/ https://www.repubblica.it/economia/2020/01/31/news/bollette_... €228M for essentially a 7% hike in pricing.
  - bobiny 5y ago
    I think that's what antimonopoly laws are for. As a Russia citizen, mobile and internet prices in supposedly more technologically advanced countries just blow my mind.
- 5y ago

oefrha 5y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20210707105923/https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/test/210707_AiDc36_6f01cdff93b8299725303f88e60febbc https://web.archive.org/web/20210707105923/https://whatdoesm... (posted another user, I can't load the site) Out of the countries listed, I only have recent experience with the U.S. It says $0.09 for 1.39MB using "the least expensive plan with a minimum data allowance of 500MB over a minimum of 30 days". That works out to $30.6-$34.2 for a 500MB plan. I'd say the pricing data is several years out of date.

wccrawford 5y ago

> https://www.reddit.com https://www.reddit.com weighs 1.39MB. Google Fi (in the US, at least) is $10/GB. So 1000mb is $10, or $.01 per mb. It'd be only $.0139 on Fi. That's quite a huge difference. The chart even says that US data would be $.09 which is still hugely different. It claims to use the cheapest plan from the dominant carrier in the country. That doesn't mean that everyone is getting screwed like this, just most people. They say they get the prices from ITU, but I don't know where on ITU they found that data, but I feel like maybe something is being used wrong.

timvdalen 5y ago
I can't imagine paying $10/GB for data, wow! For reference, I'm paying about $23/month for unlimited everything in NL. I'm pretty sure that's not even the cheapest plan you could get, I just haven't switched providers in a couple of years.
- flixic 5y ago
  Lithuania, around €10/month for everything unlimited. Granted, we have some of the cheapest mobile plans in Europe, but I just can't imagine paying my entire plan's price just for 1 GB.
- neom 5y ago
  Cell phone plans in Canada are a joke. I pay around $80CAD a month and I get 10gig data, no ability to buy more once I run out either (only my carrier does this though, most you can buy per gig after you run out, but it's extremely expensive) - It's cheaper and better for me to get an ATT sim from the US and use it in Canada (and that's indeed what i've done).
  - FractalParadigm 5y ago
    I've got a Rogers 50GB 'Unlimited' plan, with the phone financing I'm paying just north of $175/mo - when you approx the 'max-speed limit' they send you a text offering 3GB for $10, or 10GB for $30, just reply A or B and it'll automatically go on your plan on your month. There's no limit to the number of times you can do this, but it's a little sickening paying that much money for such little data.

arcadeparade 5y ago

should be increased to $100

jokoon 5y ago

Curious to see how much of this homepage is thumbnails, how much html, how much js...

sdflhasjd 5y ago

The site is ~~wrong~~ somewhat correct about how big reddits homepage is. ~~It seems to not run any scripts when testing, so 1.5MB is the basic JS + CSS.~~ In reality, it's much, much worse. (On a desktop) Even with an adblocker, reddit.com downloaded 18MB in the first 10 seconds. That would put that cost at over $1. I stopped after that because it seemed to be just continuously downloading... something. I know Reddit is quite media driven these days, but it seems to be unnecessary prefetching a lot Edit: Looks like I was testing the desktop version, see jefftk's reply. However, it doesn't help reddit's case that much. After looking into what it's actually downloading in my "desktop" test, there are lots of huge PNG images (1000x1000 +) that seem to be displayed as tiny thumbnails. And for an infinitely scrolling page, it prefetches all the images in the feed at full resolution. If I turn off my adblocker, I get an autoplaying amazon ad (~5MB). Additionally, it starts auto-playing a livestreams which is just below the fold.

fhsm 5y ago
Wow. That's a lot. I'm not sure how to replicate this but I would be curious what old.reddit.com does via an equivalent methodology.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  Firefox dev tools said ~1.3MB transferred. I think it's the increased number of thumbnails per "page", even though they're smaller. On the other hand it has no autoplaying videos and livestreams.
jefftk 5y ago
> It seems to not run any scripts when testing They source their claim to a WebPageTest run [1], and WPT does run scripts. I can reproduce their results as: 1. Open an incognito window in Chrome 2. Open devtools, and configure it as mobile 3. Navigate to reddit.com 4. See ~1.5MB transferred [1] https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_AiDc36_6f01cdff93b8299725303f88e60febbc/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1 https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_AiDc36_6f01cdff93b...
- 5y ago

danbruc 5y ago

For Germany it says 0.07 USD prepaid for 1.39 MB which is 50 USD for 1 GB. Telekom offers 2 GB for 9.95 EUR prepaid which yields 0.0082 USD and is an order of magnitude lower than the quoted number. And this is literally the first offering I looked at, the second provider I looked at offers 12 GB for 15.99 EUR which brings the number down to 0.0022 EUR. I would take those numbers with a large grain of salt at the very least.

Vahkesh 5y ago
Agreed, I'm trying to figure out where this site is getting their pricing data.
- herbst 5y ago
  I assume its something like numbeo. Thing is with this kind of data there is always a local and a tourist price. In many countries (especially Europe) you can not always buy a prepaid SIM card with a foreign passport (without extra hoops at least) or you need a real residence address. So these prices often reflect the few options that are (visibly) available for tourists.
  - Anderkent 5y ago
    I've never had an issue with a foreign passport buying a SIM. You usually need a local address but you can just use your hotels.
    - herbst 5y ago
      I usually did not either. However Netherlands and Germany have been an exception. In the Netherlands every mobile provider shoo me out of their shop refering to yallo or libera. I had an apartment and was staying 2 months, so this wasn't the issue. And Germany was essentially the same except I only tried with 3 or so providers. Most tourists still pick one of the shitty providers available at the airport or train station and go with that. Some of them provide a faster verification do you can walk out having internet, in Austria if you buy internet at a supermarket (it's uncomplicated there) it can take a few hours to verify. Or Italy, if you arrive in Venedig you find ads for internet packages everywhere. I actually needed to go to the mainland to buy a a normal SIM. As no one on the island acknowledged the cheaper packages available. My point is, it's complicated Source: I've spent months (if not years) with my laptop In Europe and Asia and internet always was the #1 priority. I also do not know if things are better today

swiley 5y ago

More disturbing than mobile prices in Canada is electricity prices in Africa IMO. I heard a while ago that people are actually trading sex for access to generator power. This means on that continent at least unneeded JS in web pages is literally AIDS.

MarkusWandel 5y ago

I've gone the opposite direction (here in Canada). I'm on a plan that costs at most $13 (+HST) per month but can get cheaper. It gives me unlimited international text/multimedia messaging, 100 dialed minutes / unlimited incoming minutes per month and 250MB of data. Pathetic? Sure. But just don't use mobile data unless you need it. 250MB is enough for data plan based messaging, Strava, Google Maps (with cached maps) and whatever information you need to look up. You don't really need to watch 1080p streaming video outside the house. If anything this actually encourages healthy phone habits. If you do need massive data, suck it up, pay the CAD $80/month for the big data package, then the incremental cost of visiting a given web site is zero. Cheaper? Look it up. It's Public Mobile prepaid. $15/month minus $2 for autopay (which everyone uses), minus $1/month for every year you've been on to a maximum of 5, minus $1/month for every referred friend (or spouse!) that is currently using it. I think the wife and I together are running at $21 or $22 per month currently. Yes, would be nice to have dirt cheap internet and mobile data, but we don't. So make the best of what we do have.

deregulateMed 5y ago
It's interesting to see the rationalization. "Just don't use it, plus good phone habits" What about value added uses for the phone? I looked up how to harvest basil today and watched a 60 second YouTube video. Or reading an encyclopedia. Or fixing a car. None of those are bad phone habits. And those previously mentioned don't necessarily have the luxury of wifi.
- MarkusWandel 5y ago
  I have a gigabyte of backup data for stuff like that; it costs $30 but you can use it up as slowly as you want (once you deplete your 250MB). I find it super annoying that low bandwidth information (i.e. a paragraph or two of text) has been replaced by ad-riddled Youtube videos! I've been able to avoid this usage pattern while on mobile data, but I can see that not everyone feels they can. Wikipedia is lightweight, no problem on frugal data.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >It's interesting to see the rationalization. >"Just don't use it, plus good phone habits" Agreed. For a couple of years I had 1-5GB mobile plans, often free (thanks to the late great RingPlus). I never used more than 1-2GB a month so they were quite sufficient for my needs. I then got unlimited service from Sprint (thanks to the late great free unlimited year offer). My usage patterns did not change. To my surprise, however, I found that no longer having to think about the usage limit—even if the limit was never a real problem before—perceptibly eased my daily life.

NoblePublius 5y ago

I pay $30/month for unlimited everything (including HotSpot) on Visible (Verizon MVNO) in NYC.

davidkunz 5y ago

You can replace reddit.com with teddit.net and have a much lighter UI.

techrat 5y ago
...and far less data collection, dark patterns, and helps to eliminate the temptation to soil ones' self by responding to the horrendous comments on that site. At this point, Reddit is just Facebook for people who think they're too good to use Facebook.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

At this point in history, I thought certain webites would be paying consumers to visit their site. Yes--literally paying us to view in credits, paypal, or bitcoin. It wold be nice to see Facebook offering a few pennies for the marketing data we pay to give them. It would be nice to be paid for high ranking comments too. Say for instance, a guy writes a researched answer to a question on Reddit, and it blew up. Reddit would pay pay that individual a few dimes. The quality of comments would probally increase? Maybe less bathroom humor, and real thoughtful answers? Could anyone imagine if we got a bill at the end of the month detailing what we pay per website/download incident? You went to facebook 40 times, at a bandwidth, or percentage you pay us, at a cost of $6.00 You went to Reddit 30 times, at a cost of $3.00 (It will never happen because the big players are becoming very good Lobbiest's. If it ever did happen, I can guarantee, there would be no bloat. If it ever did happpen, it might redispute some if the obsence profits these guys hide? I still think most people would cheerily contribute to sites they respect without any form of enticement.)

yipbub 5y ago

I'm very surprised at how much data costs in Canada. In India, it costs me 7.43 USD for 84 days of 1.5GiB high-speed 4g data per day (plus unlimited calling). After that it drops of to a lower speed, but you can top off cheaply. That's $0.058 per GiB or $0.00005 per MiB

neom 5y ago
Canada 204% larger than India with a fraction of the population. Unfortunately everything is overpriced here.
- Karsteski 5y ago
  This comparison never makes sense. A large percentage of Canada lives within 100km of the US border.

TenToedTony 5y ago

WTF. You buy a fixed amount of data in Canada?

Black101 5y ago
Often in the US too and unlimited usually doesn't mean unlimited at full speed... For example, if you use your internet at full speed for a full day, you probably would get throttled for the rest of the month.
- TenToedTony 5y ago
  That's crazy. Unlimited here is uncapped speeds with a soft fair use download ceiling of 1TB a month (last I checked, which is quite a while ago). If you surpass that repeatedly you're asked to tone it down, and if you continue to download that much, you'll have to pay more for a higher cap.

DSingularity 5y ago

Canadians are unhappy but maybe in ten years they will be happy with a population whose minds remained healthy because bandwidth costs luckily created a controlling feedback mechanism to otherwise addictive social media.

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago

Brutal. I'm on Mint which costs something like $240 a year for 2x 10GB plans. But they don't cut you off or charge you more if you go over. They just throttle you a bit more during congestion events. It costs me less than a cent to visit reddit, under the pessimistic assumption that they throttle me to zero after I use my 10GB.

TMWNN 5y ago
>I'm on Mint which costs something like $240 a year for 2x 10GB plans. But they don't cut you off or charge you more if you go over. Further, I bet that 10GB is effectively equivalent to unlimited for 90% of people.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  It is at least for me. I never use more than a GB.

dcolkitt 5y ago

This always seemed like a back door way to finally have the web finally embrace a micropayments business model. By this point ads, and the tracking scripts associated with ad networks, have grown so large that they may cost more in bandwidth than they generate in sales. People are famously hesitant to pay for content, but in this case it’s “free” if it means dumping the ads.

christophilus 5y ago

i.reddit.com for the win! Really, though, I’m part of the problem. The product I’m working on is a heavy JavaScript-based content editor. It’s definitely a much better UX than the lighter weight previous version. But we made the user-facing content pages Preact-based simply to keep our stack consistent. We’re a small team, and that’s been a real time saver. Hopefully, we’ll get around to optimizing things in the future, but it’s not something anyone other than the dev team cares about.

Communitivity 5y ago

So happy I have my grandfathered unlimited Verizon. I know I'll lose that when I move to 5G, based on what I'm seeing. Enjoying it for now though. I am excited to see the number of free municipal wi-fi growing [1], though none are near me yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_wireless_network#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_wireless_network#Uni...

TMWNN 5y ago
>So happy I have my grandfathered unlimited Verizon. I know I'll lose that when I move to 5G, based on what I'm seeing. By "unlimited" you mean an unlimited plan that does not throttle/deprioritize after ~50GB of usage, right? I pay $23 a month for two Sprint unlimited lines, but both deprioritize after 50GB (although I think I only exceeded 10GB a month once for unusual circumstances, and I hear that in many places deprioritization never happens anyway). On the other hand, there is no obstacle to my purchasing and swapping in a 5G phone on those lines.

caymanjim 5y ago

The article won't load for me, so I'm not sure if this is about reddit.com in a browser, or the Reddit mobile app. Sounds like the browser, based on other comments. They intentionally make the browser experience as terrible as possible to force people into the app (not that the app is much better). Reddit is hostile to their users and doesn't care about usability.

busymom0 5y ago

I realize this is more of an indictment on how crazy expensive data is in Canada but I would like to mention that the "redesigned" Reddit is so bloated, even my i5 Mac mini from last year struggles. And other than the bloat, they also added extra unnecessary white space to make you scroll more (and thus shove move ads in). Also the continuous popups in mobile browser to "Open in official app" is very use hostile. They basically ruined their site on purpose to make users go to their app instead as most apps can't have ad blockers unless you use PiHole or something. If I really need to, I use unofficial Apollo to view Reddit. But other than that, I have pretty much stopped visiting the site.

jcims 5y ago
Every time I wind up on the site without going to old.reddit.com, I get frustrated first but then I become enthralled that the site has been completely broken for years now. I know there are folks that defend it and possibly enjoy it, but I think they have somehow built the muscle memory to not fuck up and accidentally look the wrong way while browsing.

Traster 5y ago

I don't know about other countries, but in the UK doing this: > using the least expensive plan with a (minimum) data allowance of 500 MB over (a minimum of) 30 days Is just rubbish. It's just impossible to price things like this, take EE's pricing per GB for a 1 month sim: * 1GB - £14 - £14 per GB * 120GB - £20 - £0.16p per GB * 10GB - £20 - £2 per GB * 200GB - £23 - $0.115p per GB * Unlimited - £35 The total price of the cheapest contract is £6 cheaper than the next step up, which is 100 times cheaper per GB.

Aeolun 5y ago
Why is 120GB the same price as 10GB?
- Traster 5y ago
  Because our phone companies are 99.97% marketing. They're constantly trying to market deals and segment their market. So today it just so happens to be 120GB cheap. Next week it might be extortionately expensive. When 5G first came out it was ridiculously expensive to get decent data caps, but I would assume that they now have excess capacity and so they're trying to compete with some other competitor at that price point.
  - swiley 5y ago
    They're also trying to break their old no-longer-economical contracts.

Aeolun 5y ago

How is the least expensive plan the best case scenario. The prices go down significantly per MB on larger plans.

vincengomes 5y ago

There is a small mistake in the results. Its Hong Kong not Honk Kong

phr4ts 5y ago

Use this to automatically redirect to the old.reddit version https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

mmacvicarprett 5y ago

The cost numbers does not make any sense for me, you get 8gb for 10 usd in Brazil postpaid, around 3 times lower than the prices used.

f6v 5y ago

My iPad(it’s a 9.7 one, but anyway) suffocates when I visit Reddit. The same device that runs heavy 3D games. Something is definitely wrong.

pugworthy 5y ago
Perhaps with your iPad? Your iPad's internet connection?

Black101 5y ago

They could easily reduce that... For example, they use 48x48 images for images that are displayed at 12x12 pixels... https://i.imgur.com/nMXLd4H.png https://i.imgur.com/nMXLd4H.png

travisporter 5y ago
Not being a web dev, i'm curious why PNGs are used at all? I assumed jpeg would be smaller almost always

everdrive 5y ago

Maybe it'd be good if more people had to pay for data? Website owners might actually try to optimize their sites rather than constantly making them worse.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

This is BS, it states 3 cents for France, but most people have unlimited plans for 20 euros here.

Iv 5y ago

old.reddit.com is the only way to browse that site. I really don't think I will be able to stay the day they pull the plug on the old version.

NelsonMinar 5y ago

And you pay all that and then the page is covered with a giant modal dialog trying to force you to use the mobile app instead of your web browser.

Causality1 5y ago

because this is the least expensive plan it is the best case scenario That is a wildly incorrect claim. The only people I know on limited data plans are elderly. Everyone else is either on a cheap, slow unlimited plan or an expensive, fast unlimited plan. Even if I count my deprioritization quota of 22GB as my "limit" visiting Reddit only costs me 0.16 cents.

theknocker 5y ago

Reddit is the worst thing to happen to the internet besides google.

pmarreck 5y ago

Does anyone else just use old.reddit.com since the (now no longer new) site redesign is so awful?

Joe_Cool 5y ago
Yes! On older PCs and netbooks the new site is an absolute pain to use with massive lag and CPU usage.
rnhmjoj 5y ago
You should also try teddit.net: it's a minimal self-hosted frontend (similar to indivious and nitter). I think it's even better than the old design and works well without javascript.

makecheck 5y ago

Given all the other things Reddit does, it seems to me this could just be another part of the “ruin the web to push the app” strategy.

techrat 5y ago
Even their mobile site and app has become more hostile and laden with dark patterns. At this point, I can't even treat Reddit like a collection of community forums anymore... They make it impossible to read a thread when you come in from a Google result (unless you know the cheat code, change www in the url to old) and their content filtering is something out of a dystopian novel written by a schizophrenic bot. Trying to find any specific piece of info? Good luck.
- postalrat 5y ago
  I always assumed the push to the app was to give them more control to push whatever content they want down your throat.

api 5y ago

As soon as Reddit turns off old.reddit.com I will never return. Their now years old redesign is just horrible. It's bloated, information poor, and has totally ruined the site.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

we're all working from home, no one's using mobile data /s

dwild 5y ago

Their data is so wrong. Fizz for example is for Quebec subscriber only (but offer coverage over the whole country). It's still quite expansive per GB if you get the smallest amount of data, but still you would get for 16$ CAD per month for a 1 GB mobile plan. That means 0.0178$, which is an order of magnitude cheaper than what they said. I don't know how they got their price, that's really not clear from their page. Canada is a HUGE country, there's not a single provider that has an unique price for the whole country. Some province get far cheaper price for many different reasons (competitive market, population density, type of users, etc...). Even the big providers doesn't keep the same price in every province.

banana_giraffe 5y ago

While it doesn't change the results by an order of magnitude, reddit.com is very different depending on who's loading it. Just playing with exit points of a VPN provider, I can get mobile website that's anywhere from 500kb to 3mb to load depending on which articles are at the top in a given region. Some regions seem to love articles with big graphics, and some seem to value text articles. Or, it could just be luck of the draw.

jedberg 5y ago

Poland is near the bottom of all these graphs (meaning cheapest) and that tracks with my anecdotal experience. When I visited Europe a few years ago, I bought a SIM card in Poland and for just a couple Euro I got 4GB of data. At the time that was significantly cheaper than my own mobile plan at home.

coding123 5y ago

Considering the second most popular website in the world sends a gigabyte per hour (youtube) is this stuff a concern anymore?

snwfog 5y ago

Deck for Reddit [1] is even worse [2]. Thanks, super useful, now I know I gotta work on some assets optimization. - [1] https://rdddeck.com https://rdddeck.com - [2] https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_AiDc8S_8ed51fd2240acaa2b5a4be48139c03ad/1/details/#waterfall_view_step1 https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210707_AiDc8S_8ed51fd2240...

Shadonototro 5y ago

fighting global warming starts from here, we should punish the bloat culture advocators

yakshaving_jgt 5y ago

Highly recommend this pertinent and brilliant talk from several years ago: video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U text: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

dang 5y ago

Past related threads: The cost of using different sites on mobile networks around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192503 - April 2017 (90 comments) What Does My Site Cost? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9187128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9187128 - March 2015 (1 comment)

dang 5y ago

Submitted title was "Reddit.com weighs 1.39MB. Here’s what that costs around the globe". Since this has nothing in particular to do with the ever-sensational Reddit, that counts as linkbait. (Also, "Blah blah. Here's what that blah" is a linkbait headline trope in its own right.) We've reverted the title as the site guidelines ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

alex_smart 5y ago

The $0.01 number for India is off by at least two orders of magnitude. I use a telephone plan that gives 1GB/day for 3 months for 8USD. That comes to around $0.0001 cents per MB.

RantyDave 5y ago

Bear in mind that the smallest data plan is a pathologically bad case. For instance in New Zealand 40GB is $80/mo - so almost exactly 1USD/GB. So 1.39MB is $0.00139 but is listed at $0.05.

nicbou 5y ago

Apparently, my website's heaviest page costs 0 to 1 cent. Smaller pages are a fifth of the size. It bothers me that many similar websites (i.e. text content) load 2-5 MB of data for just text on a page. Pretty much everything past the first few kilobytes are useless to the reader. These websites fall apart when you're not on a recent Macbook with a wired gigabit connection. Developers forget that people browse the web in the subway, on intercity trains and on crappy hotel/airport internet.