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The web is an arms race. The bloat and slowness is generally due to incompetence. On one hand it’s merchandising stalking users with poorly written spyware and

The web is an arms race. The bloat and slowness is generally due to incompetence. On one hand it’s merchandising stalking users with poorly written spyware and on the other hand the technology is dictated by the lowest common denominator of developers who cannot perform without monumental hand holding. Does the end user really want or prefer the megs of framework abstraction? No, that’s immature trash from developers insecure about their jobs. This is the standard of practice and it isn’t going away. In hiring it’s seen as a preference as increased tool proliferation can qualify higher wages. The only way that’s going to get better is by moving to an alternate platform with more challenging technical concerns than populating content. With IPv6 and gigabit internet to the house becoming more common in the US there is less and less reason to require web servers, data centers, and other third party concerns. These are incredibly expensive and so long as the platform becomes progressively more hostile to their users emerging alternatives with superior on-demand capabilities will become more appealing.

specialist 5y ago
Yes and: > The bloat and slowness is generally due to incompetence. I'm sure this is true. I'm also reminded of "office automation". Conventional wisdom was that new technologies would reduce the use of paper. However, for decades, paper usage went up, and it took a long time for the reduction to happen. Curious, no? Was increased paper usage an instance of Jevons Paradox? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox I have questions. So then why did paper usage eventually plummet? Given long enough time frame, is Jevons Paradox a phase? 150 years after Jevons book The Coal Question, coal consumption is finally tanking. Decades after the start of data processing and office automation, paper usage finally tanked. Is this generalizable? Clearly software bloat (and by extension web page bloat) are catalyzed by better tools. Like the democratization of word processing (et al) begat more paper usage, IDEs (et al) begat more code production. If there is a downside slope to Jevons "rebound effect" (efficiency -> lower cost -> higher consumption), what could it look like for software bloat? What are some possible causes? For coal and paper, it was displacement by even cheaper alternatives. What's cheaper than large, slow web pages? Or conversely, how do we raise the cost of that bloat? Making a huge leap of reasoning: My optimistic self hopes that the key resource is attention (people's time). Social media values each person's eyeballs at $100/yr (or whatever). So all the nominal costs of all those bloated web pages is pretty cheap. My hope is the displacement of software bloat will be somehow related to maximizing people's cognitive abilities, making better use of attention. So replace web surfing, doom scrolling, and the misc opiates of the masses with whatever's next. This hope is strongly rooted in Clay Shirky's works Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everyone. Thanks for reading this far. To wrap this up: I regard software bloat as a phase, not inevitable. I imagine a futureperfect media ecosystem not dependent on ad supported biz models, the primary driver for web page bloat. I have no idea if people smarter than me have studied the tail end of Jevon's Paradox. Or even how much predictive power the Paradox has at all. I have no idea what the displacement may look like. Maybe patronage and subscriptions. Or maybe universal basic income, so amateurs can self produce and publish; versus "platforms" exploiting user generated content and collaborative editing. A bit of a scrambled thesis, I know. I'm writing to understand, sound out a new idea. Thanks for your patience.
bayesian_horse 5y ago
> "Bloat is generally due to incompetence" What utter arrogance. Developers are more often than not driven by time constraints and demands from higher up the food chain. What you call "bloat" is often not just the easier solution, but the only one. Of course, "bloat" can come from neglecting the non-bloatiness. But to call this mainly a function of competence is in my opinion misguided.
- austincheney 5y ago
  Perhaps its a matter of perspective. The hand holding many people require just to put text on a webpage seems pretty entitled considering what developers are paid. This especially rings true at the hostility and crying that appear when that hand holding goes away. Its like withholding sugar from a child like you ripped their heart out and watching an emotional tantrum unfold, and of course the child obviously believes they are a tortured victim of an arrogant oppressor. Stepping back from the nonsense I believe this is a training disparity.
Chris2048 5y ago
A possible solution: less general javascript and more mircroformats with the executable code in the browser. That way it should be possible to turn off a lot of that garbage that is generic JS. Of course, then the problems becomes website built to not work if you don't have that stuff. I suppose the solution is a protocol where it's not possible to know, i.e any server-side state is disallowed so that you cannot track id users have seen your ads OR the such a response cannot be proven.

specialist 5y ago

Yes and: > The bloat and slowness is generally due to incompetence. I'm sure this is true. I'm also reminded of "office automation". Conventional wisdom was that new technologies would reduce the use of paper. However, for decades, paper usage went up, and it took a long time for the reduction to happen. Curious, no? Was increased paper usage an instance of Jevons Paradox? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox I have questions. So then why did paper usage eventually plummet? Given long enough time frame, is Jevons Paradox a phase? 150 years after Jevons book The Coal Question, coal consumption is finally tanking. Decades after the start of data processing and office automation, paper usage finally tanked. Is this generalizable? Clearly software bloat (and by extension web page bloat) are catalyzed by better tools. Like the democratization of word processing (et al) begat more paper usage, IDEs (et al) begat more code production. If there is a downside slope to Jevons "rebound effect" (efficiency -> lower cost -> higher consumption), what could it look like for software bloat? What are some possible causes? For coal and paper, it was displacement by even cheaper alternatives. What's cheaper than large, slow web pages? Or conversely, how do we raise the cost of that bloat? Making a huge leap of reasoning: My optimistic self hopes that the key resource is attention (people's time). Social media values each person's eyeballs at $100/yr (or whatever). So all the nominal costs of all those bloated web pages is pretty cheap. My hope is the displacement of software bloat will be somehow related to maximizing people's cognitive abilities, making better use of attention. So replace web surfing, doom scrolling, and the misc opiates of the masses with whatever's next. This hope is strongly rooted in Clay Shirky's works Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everyone. Thanks for reading this far. To wrap this up: I regard software bloat as a phase, not inevitable. I imagine a futureperfect media ecosystem not dependent on ad supported biz models, the primary driver for web page bloat. I have no idea if people smarter than me have studied the tail end of Jevon's Paradox. Or even how much predictive power the Paradox has at all. I have no idea what the displacement may look like. Maybe patronage and subscriptions. Or maybe universal basic income, so amateurs can self produce and publish; versus "platforms" exploiting user generated content and collaborative editing. A bit of a scrambled thesis, I know. I'm writing to understand, sound out a new idea. Thanks for your patience.

bayesian_horse 5y ago

> "Bloat is generally due to incompetence" What utter arrogance. Developers are more often than not driven by time constraints and demands from higher up the food chain. What you call "bloat" is often not just the easier solution, but the only one. Of course, "bloat" can come from neglecting the non-bloatiness. But to call this mainly a function of competence is in my opinion misguided.

austincheney 5y ago
Perhaps its a matter of perspective. The hand holding many people require just to put text on a webpage seems pretty entitled considering what developers are paid. This especially rings true at the hostility and crying that appear when that hand holding goes away. Its like withholding sugar from a child like you ripped their heart out and watching an emotional tantrum unfold, and of course the child obviously believes they are a tortured victim of an arrogant oppressor. Stepping back from the nonsense I believe this is a training disparity.

Chris2048 5y ago

A possible solution: less general javascript and more mircroformats with the executable code in the browser. That way it should be possible to turn off a lot of that garbage that is generic JS. Of course, then the problems becomes website built to not work if you don't have that stuff. I suppose the solution is a protocol where it's not possible to know, i.e any server-side state is disallowed so that you cannot track id users have seen your ads OR the such a response cannot be proven.