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You can estimate a direct environmental impact of the Internet and then try to tie it back to individual websites, but it pains me that these articles seem to i

You can estimate a direct environmental impact of the Internet and then try to tie it back to individual websites, but it pains me that these articles seem to ignore the externalities, specifically how much more efficient many industries are specifically because of the Internet. E.g. commercial flights (at least pre-Covid) are generally full now and as a consequence much more efficient because of tech starting with travel sites like Hotwire. So many of our business ideas are about reducing financial waste and often times that absolutely has an environmental component. If I’ve got a web app that’s reducing waste of some external resource (fuel, food, etc.), the positive external impact may be orders of magnitude more, and spending the effort to rewrite it in vanilla JS versus improving quality and fixing bugs may be time very poorly spent.

paisawalla 5y ago
The cost-benefit analysis has been replaced by univariate zeroism in our society. >No one is too small to make a difference. And apparently no difference is too small to pursue.
- cogman10 5y ago
  The "all or nothing" attitude is something that drives me nuts. Climate change is real, for sure, but we don't need to book-keep every single source of CO2 emission. Data centers are a blip when it comes to CO2 emissions. That's why companies like microsoft and google can earn good citizen points by purchasing offsets. It doesn't cost a lot of money to offset because they aren't emitting a lot of CO2 in the grand scheme of things. Amazon's logistics emit WAY more CO2 than AWS does. It's not even close.
  - paisawalla 5y ago
    You see it everywhere: in climate change, our societal response to COVID, in claims of inequity that basically equate any statistical variation with -isms and -phobias. I personally believe that education inflation is at play: nominally, rates of people who have university degrees are up, but the real value of education has been replaced by inferior methods and poor-quality thinking. In particular, a false confidence in their understanding of statistical data. So you have a lot of people walking around with the confidence of having earned a degree and completed an education, when they actually just have brain worms. And they're impervious to criticism to the point of arrogance, because they're College Educated. I think the solution (or at least, something you personally could help do to change things) will be found in hiring practices. For open positions in fields not requiring specific specialized skills like the law, STEM, etc: stop requiring college degrees, and start using IQ tests or similar filters for those roles.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
I think the argument is less for rebuilding existing sites, and more for paying some mind to efficiency when a site is first being developed and during rewrites brought on for other reasons. A good deal of waste reduction is possible with relatively little effort if it’s done at the right time.
- aranchelk 5y ago
  The argument you are making is especially strong for people writing stuff like frameworks, build tools, etc. where a change could potentially impact all the developer users and in turn their end users.

paisawalla 5y ago

The cost-benefit analysis has been replaced by univariate zeroism in our society. >No one is too small to make a difference. And apparently no difference is too small to pursue.

cogman10 5y ago
The "all or nothing" attitude is something that drives me nuts. Climate change is real, for sure, but we don't need to book-keep every single source of CO2 emission. Data centers are a blip when it comes to CO2 emissions. That's why companies like microsoft and google can earn good citizen points by purchasing offsets. It doesn't cost a lot of money to offset because they aren't emitting a lot of CO2 in the grand scheme of things. Amazon's logistics emit WAY more CO2 than AWS does. It's not even close.
- paisawalla 5y ago
  You see it everywhere: in climate change, our societal response to COVID, in claims of inequity that basically equate any statistical variation with -isms and -phobias. I personally believe that education inflation is at play: nominally, rates of people who have university degrees are up, but the real value of education has been replaced by inferior methods and poor-quality thinking. In particular, a false confidence in their understanding of statistical data. So you have a lot of people walking around with the confidence of having earned a degree and completed an education, when they actually just have brain worms. And they're impervious to criticism to the point of arrogance, because they're College Educated. I think the solution (or at least, something you personally could help do to change things) will be found in hiring practices. For open positions in fields not requiring specific specialized skills like the law, STEM, etc: stop requiring college degrees, and start using IQ tests or similar filters for those roles.

kitsunesoba 5y ago

I think the argument is less for rebuilding existing sites, and more for paying some mind to efficiency when a site is first being developed and during rewrites brought on for other reasons. A good deal of waste reduction is possible with relatively little effort if it’s done at the right time.

aranchelk 5y ago
The argument you are making is especially strong for people writing stuff like frameworks, build tools, etc. where a change could potentially impact all the developer users and in turn their end users.