14 ms·

The 49MB web page

857 points by kermatt 7mo ago

postalrat 7mo ago
49mb web page? How about a 49meg go cli.
Bratmon 7mo ago
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I've gotten tired of these "Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads, they should just put in ads that look pretty but pay almost nothing and supplement their income by working at McDonalds" takes.
- ronsor 7mo ago
  Well, I'm going to block the ads anyway (or just leave), so if they're trying to find profitable ads, they may need to revise their strategy.
  - jdross 7mo ago
    “I’m going to either steal your work in a way you don’t consent to, or not consume it” isn’t really great. The alternative is paywalls
    - zoklet-enjoyer 7mo ago
      Much of their work consists of poorly sourced articles, sensationalism, disinformation, and bias to sway the audience.
      - Xenoamorphous 7mo ago
        Then the correct stance is to not visit those sites.
    - xigoi 7mo ago
      Steal? Their server gave me some HTML and it’s up to my user agent to present it however I want.
    - int_19h 7mo ago
      Anything that kills adtech faster is a good thing at this point.
- decimalenough 7mo ago
  I'm pretty sure people would read more and click on more ads if they didn't have to endure waiting for 49 MB of crap and then navigating a pop-up obstacle course for each article.
  - Bratmon 7mo ago
    100,000 people clicking at $0.01 CPM is way worse for them than 10,000 people clicking at $2 CPM.
- bsjshshsb 7mo ago
  49MB or homelessness? There is surely other options.
  - hilbert42 7mo ago
    Solution, see my post. ;-)
  - surcap526 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - Bratmon 7mo ago
    If you can think of any, then congratulations! You've saved journalism! You should probably tell someone so the knowledge doesn't die with you.
    - pocksuppet 7mo ago
      48MB
      - Bratmon 7mo ago
        Which MB should they cut out? Bear in mind that any cut that reduces their CPM or rate of conversation to paid will have to also include an equivalent reduction in their staff.
        bsjshshsb 7mo ago
        Maybe the old "speed the page up and fewer people will bounce" adage applies?
        pocksuppet 7mo ago
        Reminds me of the recent discussion about how news websites have to get more shit as they lose users, but wait no they don't because nobody heard of a restaurant making worse food because people didn't want to eat there, because that would become a death spiral very quickly. (Can @dang explain why he decided to rate-limit me now?)
- neya 7mo ago
  This argument is valid if journalism was actually journalism instead of just ripping off trending stories from HN and Reddit and rehashing it with sloppy AI and calling it a day and putting in 4 lines of text buried inside 400 ads.
  - pibaker 7mo ago
    I don't like the state of journalism either but you realize this is a vicious cycle, no? People not paying for news (by buying newspaper, or more importantly paying for classified ads) leading to low quality online reporting leading to people not wanting to pay for online news.
    - curtisblaine 7mo ago
      I never understand this type of comment. People don't pay for news so newspapers (which by the way have pay walls) are forced to degrade their service. It seems strange to me. If I have a restaurant and people don't want to pay for my food, making even worse food with worse service doesn't seem a good solution. If I write books and people don't buy them, writing worse books doesn't make my sales better. Why journalists are different? They sell a service for money like all the others, but for some reason they have a special status and it's totally understandable that they respond to bad sales with a worse product. And actually, somehow it's our fault as customers. For some reason we should keep buying newspapers even if we don't think it's worth to save them from themselves.
      - apublicfrog 7mo ago
        Using your analogy, if every restaurant in town had a problem where most people wanted to come in and get food for free (and it was an expectation in the industry) and people refused to go in and pay, everyone would be upset they could no longer go out to eat when there were none left. If nobody is interested in paying for their meal, you can't be shocked the ingredient and chef quality drops in turn.
        curtisblaine 7mo ago
- scared_together 7mo ago
  In the case of the New York Times, they have subscriptions and many are willing to pay for their work - but their subscriptions are not ad-free.
  - vesselapi 7mo ago
    This is what killed my willingness to subscribe to most outlets. If I'm paying, I expect the page to load in under a second with zero tracking. Instead you get the same bloated experience minus a banner ad or two.
- curtisblaine 7mo ago
  > Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads I mean, they can absolutely try. That doesn't mean they should succeed.
- hrmtst93837 7mo ago
  [flagged]
decimalenough 7mo ago
This is why people continue to lament Google Reader (and RSS in general): it was a way to read content on your own terms, without getting hijacked by ads.
- Cyphase 7mo ago
  RSS and feed readers still exist! All hope is not lost.
  - decimalenough 7mo ago
    Sure, I use Feedly myself, but RSS is increasingly marginalized. I use to follow blogs, but it's not usable for mainstream media, Reddit, HN, etc etc.
    - lightandlight 7mo ago
      > Reddit, HN Hacker News still has a feed (that's the only reason why I saw this thread). And Reddit gives you a feed for your subscribed subreddits.
      - KomoD 7mo ago
        You can also get feeds for any subreddit, user or post https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator.rss https://www.reddit.com/user/spez.rss https://www.reddit.com/user/spez.rss
    - 4k93n2 7mo ago
      something like RSSHub can be used in conjunction with your RSS reader and will generate feeds for sites that dont have them. RSS-Bridge is another option
- fsflover 7mo ago
  People should stop lamenting Google Reader and start using RSS. There are numerous threads about it on HN, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45459233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45459233
h4ch1 7mo ago
This rubbish also exists disproportionately for recipe pages/cooking websites as well. You have 20 ads scattered around, an autoplaying video of some random recipe/ad, 2-3 popups to subscribe, buy some affiliated product and then the author's life story and then a story ABOUT the recipe before I am able to see the detailed recipe in the proper format. It's second nature to open all these websites in reader mode for me atp.
- jopsen 7mo ago
  Good sites do exist. It's just that they drown.
  - h4ch1 7mo ago
    True, these ad heavy cooking sites also dabble extensively in SEOmaxxing their way to the top.
  - nativeit 7mo ago
    I remember browsing the web in 1993-1994. It was literally a list of webpages. Yahoo was there, though, so presumably they've fallen farthest?
ray023 7mo ago
I think it's a GOOD thing, actually. Because all these publications a dying anyway. And even if your filter out all the ad and surveillance trash, you are left with trash propaganda and brain rot content. Like why even make the effort of filtering out the actual text from some "journalist" from these propaganda outlets. It's not even worth it. If people tune out only because how horrible the sites are, good.
- hax0ron3 7mo ago
  I think that unless one is well-connected or is willing to pay significant money, time, and/or effort to obtain high-quality information, one will still generally get more accurate information about the world by reading between the lines of the propaganda than one would by not reading the propaganda at all.
hilbert42 7mo ago
These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort. Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript. We'll simply cut the headlines from the offending website and past it into a search engine and find another site with the same or similar info but with easier access. I no longer think about it as by now my actions are automatic. Rarely do I find an important story that's just limited to only one website, generally dozens have the story and because of syndication the alternative site one selects even has identical text and images. My default browsing is with JavaScript defaulted to "off" and it's rare that I have to enable it (which I can do with just one click). I never see Ads on my Android phone or PC and that includes YouTube. Disabling JavaScript on webpages nukes just about all ads, they just vanish, any that escape through are then trapped by other means. In ahort, ads are optional. (YouTube doesn't work sans JS, so just use NewPipe or PipePipe to bypass ads.) Disabling JavaScript also makes pages blindingly fast as all that unnecessary crap isn't loaded. Also, sans JS it's much harder for websites to violate one's privacy and sell one's data. Do I feel guilty about skimming off info in this manner? No, not the slightest bit. If these sites played fair then it'd be a different matter but they don't. As they act like sleazebags they deserve to be treated as such.
- CalRobert 7mo ago
  Do you think youtube will continue to make it possible to use alternate clients, or eventually go the way of e.g. Netflix with DRM so you're forced to use their client and watch ads?
  - curtisblaine 7mo ago
    Big tech will slowly enforce "secure browsing" and "secure OS" in a way that will make it impossible to browse the web without a signed executable approved by them. DRM is just a temporary stopgap.
napolux 7mo ago
and the NYT web team was praised as one of the best in the world some (many?) years ago.
- gnabgib 7mo ago
  Some of them are good (formerly Richard Harris - Svelte[0]) some of them should stop podcasting. [0]: https://svelte.dev/ https://svelte.dev/
- keane 7mo ago
  previously: nytlabs.com https://web.archive.org/web/20191025052129/http://nytlabs.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191025052129/http://nytlabs.co... now: https://rd.nytimes.com https://rd.nytimes.com
mvrckhckr 7mo ago
Only major media can get away with this kind of bloat. For the normal website, Google would never include you in the SERPs even if your page is a fraction of that size.
galphanet 7mo ago
This is just the top of the iceberg. Don't get me started on airlines websites (looking at you Air Canada), where the product owner, designers, developers are not able to get a simple workflow straight without loading Mb of useless javascript and interrupt the user journey multiple times. Give me back the command line terminal like Amadeus, that would be perfect. How can we go back to a Web where websites are designed to be used by the user and not for the shareholders?
- bigfatkitten 7mo ago
  > How can we go back to a Web where websites are designed to be used by the user and not for the shareholders? Or for developers to pad their CV.
- niccl 7mo ago
  Sadly, I think the only answer is some other form of payment than ad clicks. I've no idea what that could be, though.
- userbinator 7mo ago
  How can we go back to a Web where websites are designed to be used by the user and not for the shareholders? Loudly oppose the trendchasing devs who have been brainwashed into the "newer is better" mindset by Big Tech. I'm sure the shareholders would want to reduce the amount they spend on server/bandwidth costs and doing "development and maintenance" too. Simple HTML forms can already make for a very usable and cheap site, yet a whole generation of developers have been fed propaganda about how they need to use JS for everything.
- ngruhn 7mo ago
  > Don't get me started on airlines websites You can't beat China Southern . They have the most dog shit website I've ever seen. The flight was fine but I gave up doing online check in after 3 attempts. Never mind the bloat: - required text fields with wrong or missing labels. One field was labeled "ticket no.". It kept getting rejected. I randomly tried passport number instead. It worked. - sometimes fields only have a placeholder that you can't fully read because the field has not enough width ("Please enter the correct...") and the placeholder disappears once you start typing. - date picker is randomly in Chinese - makes you go through multi step seat selection process only to tell you at the end that seat selection is not possible anymore. - signed up with email; logged out and went back to the SAME login page; now sign up via phone number is required!?
PunchyHamster 7mo ago
Our developers managed to run around 750MB per website open once. They have put in ticket with ops that the server is slow and could we look at it. So we looked. Every single video on a page with long video list pre-loaded a part of it. The single reason the site didn't ran like shit for them is coz office had direct fiber to out datacenter few blocks away. We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit of connection speed, anything more and they just make nonsense out of it.
- ceejayoz 7mo ago
  Same for fancy computers. Dev on a fast one if you like, but test things out on a Chromebook.
  - Joel_Mckay 7mo ago
    Based on the damage rate for company laptop screens, one can usually be sure anything high-end will be out of your own pocket. =3
  - mananaysiempre 7mo ago
    “Craptop duty”[1]. (Third time in three years I’m posting an essentially identical comment, hah.) [1] https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/ https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/
    - tom1337 7mo ago
      I now wonder if it'd be a good idea to move our end to end tests to a pretty slow vm instead of beefy 8 core 32gb ram machine and check which timeouts will be triggered because our app may have been unoptimized for slower environments...
      - bombcar 7mo ago
        It’s worth doing at least sometimes; schedule an over The Weekend-to-Weekend test on slow hardware and log the issues. Even if you don’t fix them, knowing where the weak points are is valuable for when they do snap in production.
Crowberry 7mo ago
I hate this trend of active distraction. Most blogs have a popup asking you to subscribe as soon as you start scrolling. It’s as if everyone designed their website around the KPI of irritating your visitors and getting them to leave ASAP.
- Anamon 7mo ago
  Those are probably at the top of my website annoyances list. "Want to get more like this in your inbox?" -- I don't even know what "this" is, you barely let me read the first paragraph before asking! I'm sure the conversion rate of those things is being tracked, but somehow I can't believe that would even lead to a single newsletter signup. Who on Earth feels like they're not receiving enough e-mails and subscribe to the first mass mailing that asks? Maybe some people whose browsers auto-fill their e-mail address and they click the wrong button to close the pop-over?
throwatdem12311 7mo ago
49mb web page? Try a 45mb graphql response.
zahlman 7mo ago
This site more or less practices what it preaches. `newsbanner.webp` is 87.1KB (downloaded and saved; the Network tab in Firefox may report a few times that and I don't know why); the total image size is less than a meg and then there's just 65.6KB of HTML and 15.5 of CSS. And it works without JavaScript... but there does appear to be some tracking stuff. A deferred call out to Cloudflare, a hit counter I think? and some inline stuff at the bottom that defers some local CDN thing the old-fashioned way. Noscript catches all of this and I didn't feel like allowing it in order to weigh it.
- Gormo 7mo ago
  It's likely a static site being hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which auto-inserts beacon.js.
cjs_ac 7mo ago
My family's first broadband internet connection, circa 2005, came with a monthly data quota of 400 MB. The fundamental problem of journalism is that the economics no longer works out. Historically, the price of a copy of a newspaper barely covered the cost of printing; the rest of the cost was covered by advertising. And there was an awful lot of advertising: everything was advertised in newspapers. Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist were a section of the newspaper, as was whichever website you check for used cars or real estate listings. Journalism had to be subsidised by advertising, because most people aren't actually that interested in the news to pay the full cost of quality reporting; nowadays, the only newspapers that are thriving are those that aggressively target those who have an immediate financial interest in knowing what's going on: the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and so on. The fact is that for most people, the news was interesting because it was new every day. Now that there is a more compelling flood of entertainment in television and the internet, news reporting is becoming a niche product. The lengths that news websites are going to to extract data from their readers to sell to data brokers is just a last-ditch attempt to remain profitable.
- ivanjermakov 7mo ago
  I remember getting punishment from parents for downloading 120MB World of Tanks update over metered home internet. Our monthly quota was 250MB. It was not that long ago, 2010.
  - biotinker 7mo ago
    2010 was a couple years after YouTube enabled 1080p uploads. 250MB a month was insanely small in 2010.
    - ivanjermakov 7mo ago
      Third world country fo ya. We got home internet in ~2007 and I remember visiting friends to have exciting YouTube-watching activity.
  - idop 7mo ago
    In the late '90s, a friend recommended I download some freeware from a website. It was 1.2MB. I told him "are you crazy? 1.2MB? It's gonna take a whole week!"
lousken 7mo ago
rule #1 is to always give your js devs only core 2 quad cpus + 16GB of RAM they won't be able to complain about low memory but their experience will be terrible every time they try to shove something horrible into the codebase
userbinator 7mo ago
I also use and like the comparison in units of Windows 95 installs (~40MB), which is also rather ironic in that Win95 was widely considered bloated when it was released. While this article focuses on ads, it's worth noting that sites have had ads for a long time, but it's their obnoxiousness and resource usage that's increased wildly over time. I wouldn't mind small sponsored links and (non-animated!) banners, but the moment I enable JS to read an article and it results in a flurry of shit flying all over the page and trying to get my attention, I leave promptly.
- gxs 7mo ago
  I would love for someone more knowledgeable in this space than I to chime in on the economics of this industry Are the few cents you get from antagonizing users really worth it? I suspect the answer is simple and that most users don’t give a shit I think it has to do a lot with when you came of age - I’m in my late 30s, I got my first tech job at 14 as a sys admin for a large school district, and every single developer, admin, etc that I knew was already going on about the free internet. As a result, I’ve never had a tolerance for anything but the most reasonable advertisements I think that ideology is necessary to care enough and be motivated enough to really get rid of ads, how fucking awful the websites are alone should be enough but for most people it isn’t
the_snooze 7mo ago
It's really hard to consider any kind of web dev as "engineering." Outcomes like this show that they don't have any particular care for constraints. It's throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall YOLO programming.
- BoneShard 7mo ago
  it's still engineering, just for different constraints - cost & speed.
- nayroclade 7mo ago
  There are plenty of web devs who care about performance and engineering quality. But caring about such things when you work on something like a news site is impossible: These sites make their money through user tracking, and it's literally your job to stuff in as many 3rd-party trackers as management tells you to. Any dev who says no on the basis that it'll slow the site down will get fired as quickly as a chef who get a shift job in McDonalds and tries to argue for better cuisine.
shevy-java 7mo ago
Ublock origin helps mitigate at the least a little bit here.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
mrb 7mo ago
Let's play a fun prediction: I ask HN readers what will be the page size of NYTimes.com in 10 years? Or 20 years? Want to bet 100 MB? 1 GB? Is it unthinkable? 20 years ago, a 49 MB home page was unthinkable.
- aembleton 7mo ago
  In 10 years - 100MB In 20 years - 20MB I think there'll continue to be growth in page sizes, but then maybe we'll consider efficiency, or the NYTimes shuts down and the 20MB page will be the liquidators selling the domain. Maybe we don't even use domains by then as everything is on an app.
dizzy9 7mo ago
I remember in 2008, when Wizards of the Coast re-launched the official Dungeons & Dragons website to coincide with the announcement of the fourth edition rules. The site was something in the region of 4 MB, plus a 20 MB embedded video file. A huge number of people were refreshing the site to see what the announcement was, and it was completely slammed. Nobody could watch the trailer until they uploaded it to YouTube later. 4 MB was an absurd size for a website in 2008. It's still an absurd size for a website.
vsgherzi 7mo ago
Modern web dev is ridiculous. Most websites are an ad ridden tracking hellacape. Seeing sites like hn where lines of js are taken seriously is a godsend. Make the web less bloated.
- Jigsy 7mo ago
  I agree with this. Just because a website can eat all my RAM doesn't mean it should...
- wat10000 7mo ago
  What really blows my mind is how unusable it is. How often do you visit a web site and there’s so much crap overlaid on the page that you can barely see the actual content? Surely that can’t be good for their ability to make money, yet they persist.
frereubu 7mo ago
When working at the BBC in the late 90s, the ops team would start growling at you if a site's home page was over 70kb...
snickerer 7mo ago
Allowing scripting on websites (in the mid-90s) was a completely wrong decision. And an outrage. Programs are downloaded to my computer and executed without me being able to review them first—or rely on audits by people I trust. That’s completely unacceptable; it’s fundamentally flawed. Of course, you disable scripts on websites. But there are sites that are so broken that they no longer work properly, since the developers are apparently so confused that they assume people only view their pages with JavaScript enabled. It would have been so much better if we had simply decided back in the ’90s that executable programs and HTML don’t belong together. The world would be so much better today.
- coin 7mo ago
  Stepping back, it's pretty ridiculous that I need to download executable code, often bloated, solely to view read-only content. Just render the thing on the backend and send it to the client.
  - FridgeSeal 7mo ago
    But the web-dev-hype people told me that JS-heavy SPA’s (and associated designs) were faster and better for the user! I didn’t bother validating this, but I’m sure they wouldn’t lie or misinterpret!!
    - jiggawatts 7mo ago
      For me personally the most infuriating example of this is the Azure Updates[1] page, which in my job I need to check nearly daily to see what's reaching EoL, what's new, etc... A couple of years ago they redeveloped it as a SPA app. The original server-rendered version of it worked just fine, but it "had" to be made into an interactive client-side monstrosity that loads many times slower for "reasons". It doesn't even load successfully about a quarter of the time. It shows items in reverse order (entries from 2013 first), which is some sort of async loading bug. They will never fix this. It's been there for two years already, it'll be there for a decade more, mark my words. Then, it takes about a minute to load sometimes on a poor connection. The links are JavaScript and don't allow "open in new tab". Etc... All of this to enable client-side filtering, which is a non-feature nobody ever wanted. A simple server-side filter capability would do the same thing, faster. And anyway, the filtering is broken! If click the "New or updated" filter, it drops down an empty selection with no options. Clicking anything else doesn't change what is shown! While developing this over-engineered monstrosity, they took the original site offline for "maintenance!" Hilariously, despite Azure having multiple CDN products, the Azure Updates page doesn't correctly use their own CDN and marks almost everything as "no-cache; no-store" causing 2.5 MB (after compression) to be re-transferred every time, despite using unique signed URLs with SHA256 hashes in them! This is the state of web-dev in the 2020s: A multi-trillion-dollar software company can't hire developers that know anything else other than SPA web app development! This commonly used page has spectacularly poor web engineering, and this is from a company that sells a web app platform, a CDN, and the ASP.NET web app development framework! If they can't get it right, who can!? [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/updates/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/updates/
temporallobe 7mo ago
Even enterprise COTS products can have some of these issues. We have an on-premise Atlassian suite, and Jira pages sometimes have upwards of 30MB total payloads for loading a simple user story page — and keep in mind there is no ad-tech or other nonsense going on here, it’s just pure page content.
65 7mo ago
I worked at big newspapers as a software engineer. Please do not blame the engineers for this mess. As the article says news is in a predicament because of the ads business model. Subscriptions alone usually cannot cover all costs and ads will invariably make their way in. For every 1 engineer it seems like there are 5 PMs who need to improve KPIs somehow and thus decide auto playing video will improve metrics. It does. It also makes people hate using your website. I would constantly try to push back against the bullshit they'd put on the page but no one really cares what a random engineer thinks. I don't think there's any real way to solve this unless we either get less intrusive ad tech or news gets a better business model. Many sites don't even try with new business models, like local classifieds or local job boards. And good luck getting PMs to listen to an engineer talking about these things. For now, the bloat remains.
lambdaone 7mo ago
The article says "I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from." The answer is really simple and follows on from this article; the purpose of the app is even more privacy violation and tracking.
drnick1 7mo ago
It's almost criminal that the article does not mention network-wide DNS blocklists as an obvious solution to this problem. I stop nearly 100% of ads in their tracks using the Hagezi ultimate list, and run uBlock on desktop for cosmetic filtering and YouTube. I should really run some to tests to figure out how much lighter the load on my link is thanks to the filter. I also manually added some additional domains (mostly fonts by Google and Adobe) to further reduce load and improve privacy.
- hilbert42 7mo ago
  "…how much lighter the load on my link is thanks to the filter." Not done any rigorous tests but my experience has been rhat it can be lower than a tenth.
- int_19h 7mo ago
  It does indeed work pretty well today, but they have already developed ways to circumvent it. For example, serving ads from the same domain as the main page.
  - drnick1 7mo ago
    AFAIK, YouTube has been doing that for years and uBlock has consistently adapted. It's also easier for Google to do that since it owns the ad network and doesn't need to verify ad prints are legitimate and not inflated by the third party that displays them.
    - int_19h 7mo ago
      The point is that you still need uBlock, this can't be done via DNS filtering. I expect this kind of stuff to become more common in the future if adblocker usage grows. It might be CDNs doing that, too.
jaredklewis 7mo ago
I just loaded the nytimes.com page as an experiment. The volume of tracking pixels and other ad non-sense is truly horrifying. But at least in terms of the headline metric of bandwidth, it's somewhat less horrifying. With my ad-blocker off, Firefox showed 44.47mb transferred. Of that 36.30mb was mp4 videos. These videos were journalistic in nature (they were not ads). So, yes in general, this is like the Hindenburg of web pages. But I still think it's worth noting that 80% of that headline bandwidth is videos, which is just part of the site's content. One could argue that it is too video heavy, but that's an editorial issue, not an engineering issue.
- squidbeak 7mo ago
  Why are we supposed to think it's normal to see videos on every page? Even where it's directly relevant to the current page, what's the justification in thrusting those 36.30mb on the user before they explicitly click play?
  - jaredklewis 7mo ago
    I don’t think you are supposed to think anything. It’s a news site with a lot of auto-playing video. If you like that kind of content, great. If not, there’s lots of other websites with different mixes of content. I subscribe to the economist which has few videos and they never auto play. But that’s a question of taste. 5mb of JavaScript and hundreds of tracking assets is not.
- Jap2-0 7mo ago
  Is that with Firefox's built-in tracking prevention disabled?
binaryturtle 7mo ago
It would be less hypocritical if that critique of the situation wasn't posted on a website that itself loads unnecessary 3rd party resources (e.g. cloudflare insights). Luckily I use a proper content blocker (uBlock Origin in hard mode).
- aembleton 7mo ago
  Even with ad blocking, it's transferring over 200KB of data, half of which is to load a couple of fonts. Not terrible but the basic HTML is only 17KB.
WhitneyLand 7mo ago
The sad thing is, this is already a paywalled site. I’m afraid someone who wants to support professional journalism and agrees to pay ~$300/yr for an NYT subscription still gets most (all?) of this nonsense?
- nativeit 7mo ago
  It's certainly one of the reasons why I ended my NY Times subscription in 2024, and split that money between recurring donations to public media, Archive.org, and the EFF.
opengrass 7mo ago
Removing the round navbar in the other pages is unsettling.
xrd 7mo ago
I was really surprised when I went to book a flight on Frontier (don't judge me!) and a request from analytics.tiktok.com loaded. I have a lot of discomfort about that. Bloat and surveillance go hand in hand.
jackby03 7mo ago
Its a crazy goal , amazing , congrats. Its vanilla stack?
benbristow 7mo ago
Bit unfair, turned off my adblocker and ran NY Times website with cache disabled via Dev Tools, came to 3MB. Still pretty damn high but not 49MB. (Will say I'm in the UK so might be different across the pond).
- aembleton 7mo ago
  I'm also in the UK, and it came to 31MB. Then I turned off uBO, Firefox tracking protection, and rejected the cookie notice, and it went over 40MB.
ericra 7mo ago
Not only are loading times and total network usage ridiculous, sites will continue to violate your privacy via trackers and waste your CPU even when background idling. I've written about these issues a few times in the last few years, so just sharing for those interested: A comparison of CPU usage for idling popular webpages: https://ericra.com/writing/site_cpu.html https://ericra.com/writing/site_cpu.html Regarding tracker domains on the New Yorker site: https://ericra.com/writing/tracker_new_yorker.html https://ericra.com/writing/tracker_new_yorker.html
- ajolly 7mo ago
  This! I need some better browser extensions to just start suspending JavaScript after the pages been in the background for a period of time. I've tried all of the auto discard type extensions but yeah back on CPU usage is crazy
ksec 7mo ago
>I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from. So they could do exactly what they are doing on the web and may be even more but with Native code so it feels much faster. I got to the point and wonder why cant all the tracking companies and ad network just all share and use the same library. But on Web page bloat. Let's not forget Apps are insanely large as well. 300 - 700MB for Banking, Traveling or other Shopping App. Even if you cut 100MB on L10n they are still large just because of again tracking and other things.
socalgal2 7mo ago
Yes, it's 100% horrible. For me the solution is simple. If I click a link and the page is covered in ads and popup videos I CLOSE THE PAGE!!!! Vote with your behavoir. Stop going to these sites!
scosman 7mo ago
I opened a startup's page the other day, and their streaming demo video was 550mb
ezekiel68 7mo ago
An anecdote from an OG (me): The same phenomenon worsened during the DotCom Meltdown and the Great Financial Crisis. This accelerated desperation is a sign of the times; paying subscribers are likely cancelling due to current economic conditions.
diven_rastdus 7mo ago
[dead]
ahf8Aithaex7Nai 7mo ago
Oh yeah, that old topic. We’ve already discussed this back when text-heavy websites started reaching megabyte sizes. So I’m going to go look for the posts in this thread that try to explain and defend that. I’m especially looking forward to the discussions about whether ad blocking is theft or morally reprehensible. If those are still around.
workfromspace 7mo ago
I cannot even imagine browsing the internet or using my devices without Consent-O-Matic and NextDNS. with almost all options and filters enables ofc
jayseattle 7mo ago
[dead]
jlebar 7mo ago
Got to hand it to this guy, this page loads FAST.
Beijinger 7mo ago
"The Sticky Video Player Publishers love embedding auto-playing videos these days, which isn't really popular. You'll find mulitple forum, Reddit, HN, or Twitter threads about it. To make it somehow worse...when you scroll down, you think it would leave you as it leaves the viewport. No. It detaches, shrinks and pins itself to the bottom right of your screen and continues playing. It keeps the distraction going and as if teasing you, features a microscopic 'X' button with a tiny hit area (violating Fitts's Law)." Is there not way to stop this? The do not autoplay videos option often does not work.
- aembleton 7mo ago
  Blocking the domain of the video player works. For example, primis.tech you can add this to your uBO filter: ||primis.tech$domain=~primis.tech Primis is one of them, but there are a few of these companies. I can't remember them all.
- Anamon 7mo ago
  The no-autoplay feature in Firefox has been very reliable in my experience. Unfortunately, it has a few issues of its own (play/pause status on YouTube getting out of sync, or not being able to use wildcards in the whitelist so you have to unblock every artist or label on Bandcamp separately).
deleted 7mo ago
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maho 7mo ago
Relevant and fun read: The Website Obesity Crisis (2015) https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
- esher 7mo ago
  Was about to add this too!
LandenLove 7mo ago
I recently had to switch to a Japanese LINE account to gain access to certain features. I had no idea how good I had it on my American LINE account. The Japanese account is covered with ads EVERYWHERE on the home screen and even in the chat area. I have no idea how this app is still popular in Japan. I would pay to remove the ads if I could. They also have their own tiktok and AI slop that I never knew about.
gingersnap 7mo ago
I'm thinking that I gonna start making all my webpages <1mb in size, and compensate that with adding windows 95 to each page load.
gherkinnn 7mo ago
[dead]
DorkyPup 7mo ago
Author here. Woke up in today to see this on the front page, thank you to the person who submitted it! Initially, my biggest fear was the HN "Hug of Death" taking it down. Happily, Cloudflare's edge caching absorbed 19.24 GB of bandwidth in a few hours with a 98.5% cache hit ratio, so the origin server barely noticed. The discussions here about DNS-level blocking and Pi-hole are spot on. It's interesting that the burden of a clean reading experience is slowly being offloaded to the user's network stack.
- quectophoton 7mo ago
  Out of curiosity, do you have (and want to share) stats about requests per second? It's always nice to know these things for future reference. No worries if not :)
  - DorkyPup 7mo ago
    Sure thing! I don't have the exact instantaneous peak since Cloudflare groups historical data by the hour on the free tier, but the peak 60 minutes last night saw 70,100 requests. That averages out to about 20 requests per second sustained over the hour. Wish I could be more granular but hope that helps a little.
  - firefoxd 7mo ago
    Not the author, but last year I wrote about my experience being on #1 on HN [0]. I created a visualization of the requests hitting my server. [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/surviving-the-hug-of-death https://idiallo.com/blog/surviving-the-hug-of-death
    - slashtab 7mo ago
      In Brave browser on Android device, the visualisation media(?) is blacked out. just wanted to give you a heads up.
      - firefoxd 7mo ago
        Thanks for letting me know. It seems like when Brave is set to aggressively block tracking, it also blocks the canvas since it could be used for fingerprinting a device. I'll see if an avg version is viable in the future.
voidUpdate 7mo ago
> "Does anyone even care about how their end-product appears to a user anymore?" Of course not. Its all about maximising shareholder value. The users aren't a consideration anymore
jakub_g 7mo ago
> 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data Just FYI how this generally works: it's not developers who add it, but non-technical people. Developers only add a single `<script>` in the page, which loads Google Tag Manager, or similar monstrosity, at the request of someone high up in the company. Initially it loads ~nothing, so it's fine. Over time, non-technical people slap as many advertising "partner" scripts they can in the config of GTM, straight to prod without telling developers, and without thinking twice about impact on loading times etc. All they track is $ earned on ads. (It's sneaky because those scripts load async in background so it doesn't immediately feel like the website gets slower / more bloated. And of course, on a high end laptop the website feels "fine" compared to a cheap Android. Also, there's nothing developers can do about those requests, they're under full the control of all those 3rd-parties.) Fun fact: "performance" in the parlance of adtech people means "ad campaign performance", not "website loading speed". ("What do you mean, performance decreased when we added more tracking?")
- Cthulhu_ 7mo ago
  I tried to fight against the introduction of GTM in a project I worked on; we spent a lot of effort on coding, reviewing, testing, optimizing and minimizing client-side code before our end-users would see it, and the analytics people want a shortcut to inject any JS anywhere? I didn't win that one, but I did make sure that it would only load after the user agreed to tracking cookies and the like.
  - zbentley 7mo ago
    Yeah, it’s really hard to compete with a solution that takes engineers out of the loop. The biggest reason large orgs go so crazy with GTM is that it’s a shadow deployment pipeline that doesn’t require waiting for engineers to work a request, or QA, or a standard release process. And sure, better prioritization and cooperation with eng can make the “real” release processes work better for non-eng stakeholders, but “better” is never going to reach the level of “full autonomy to paste code to deploy via tag manager”. This is the same reason why many big apps have a ton of Wordpress-managed pages thougout the product (not just marketing pages); often, that’s because the ownership and release process for the WP components is “edit a web UI” rather than “use git and run tests and have a test plan and schedule a PR into a release”.
sodimel 7mo ago
Here's something I wrote in 2021: > Today, there's ~30 times more js than html on homepages of websites (from a list of websites from 5 years ago). It seems that this number only go up.
eviks 7mo ago
> users are greeted by what I call Z-Index Warfare Nice term! > Or better yet, inject the newsletter signup as a styled, non-intrusive div between paragraphs 4 and 5. If the user has scrolled that far, they are engaged. They're engaged with the content! There is no way to make some irrelevant signup "non-intrusive". It's similar to links to unrelated articles - do you want users to actually read the article or jump around reading headlines?
- andypants 7mo ago
  Z-index warfare is so stupid (the practice, not the name). It's not only with media publications, but ecommerce sites as well. There have been countless businesses that have lost out on my money because I clicked on their ad (good job!), start reading the product info on their website as it loads (that's basically a sale), and then the page finished loading with a barrage of popups for cookie consent, newsletter signup for a discount code, special offers, special sale, spin the wheel for a prize, etc. That's when I close the tab and forget about it.
  - Fiveplus 7mo ago
    I concur. It is an incredibly stupid practice for an e-commerce portal to distract or burden their users with anything other than the product they're viewing. I'm like, "Buddy, you have a potential paying customer at your doorstep, all you have to do is not insult them and they'll whip out their credit card on the next step."
leokennis 7mo ago
Every time some site or person tries to make me feel bad for using AdGuard DNS, ad blockers etc. I read an article like this and I feel fine. I see three options: 1. Show me reasonable ads and I will disable ad blocking 2. Do the crap described in this article and don't complain when I arm myself against it 3. Do a hard paywall and no ads; force me to pay to see your content
- basilikum 7mo ago
  It's my device. I decide what I download, execute and display on my device. A website is free to offer me to download an ad and I am free to decline that offer. Demanding me to download anything on my device or even worse execute someone else's programs [JS] and claiming that I have a moral obligation to do so is deeply creepy.
trashb 7mo ago
One of the things I don't get is the economics of these trackers. Someone is serving this amount of data to every visitor. Even if you want to track the user as much as possible, wouldn't it make sense to figure out how to do that with the least amount of data transfer possible as that would dramatically reduce your operating cost? Perhaps size optimization is the next frontier for these trackers.
- ktpsns 7mo ago
  Traffic for the static payload is super cheap. And the insane amount of requests is handled easily by modern event-based architectures. The operation costs are most likely only a tiny amount of the overall economics of the tracker's buisness model. The generated tracking data is certainly worth an order of magnitude more then it takes to generate it.
net01 7mo ago
In the same vein, https://512kb.club/ https://512kb.club/ is a user-submitted website that features content under 512 KB in size! (blogs, news, etc.)
fixxation92 7mo ago
I actually feel offended with a download size this big, it's completely careless from the website owners
dannersy 7mo ago
This is about to get substantially worse as companies introduce more AI into their workflows.
throwawayffffas 7mo ago
> I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from. Apps don't have adblockers.
- el_io 7mo ago
  Most in-app Ads can be blocked with simply changing your dns. And most people don't even use adblocker when browsing normal site. I kind of had to tech my surrounding people to use adblocker.
  - throwawayffffas 7mo ago
    Isn't that a much higher bar for most people? I don't even know how to change the dns on my phone, and I am not a typical user, I am a dev. But running a browser that blocks ads like duckduckgos is super simple. But yeah I am sure there are additional tracking and possibly retention benefits.
donohoe 7mo ago
I started on this when project when I was at The New Yorker. I had just manage to convince people to give us space to do web performance optimization - and then we had to drop it quickly to work on AMP. Very frustrating. This site was created to give developers and pms some ammunition to work on improving load speed https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/
- carlosjobim 7mo ago
  The leader https://nautil.us https://nautil.us on your board is incredibly fast!
  - Nine99 7mo ago
    [dead]
- Fiveplus 7mo ago
  Great project and we definitely need to maintain these public lists. Well done!
WesMakesThings 7mo ago
[dead]
My_Name 7mo ago
This is why I have a pi-hole and a selection of addons for my browser. I am considering moving to technitium though, it seems better featured.
fireflash38 7mo ago
You want to know why so many people either jump straight to comments or use alternate sources (archive, llms)? Because if you load the actual site, it freaking blows to use the damn thing. So much hostile user design. Edit: NPR gets a little shout out for being able to close their annoying pop-ups by clicking anywhere that's not the notification. So it's still crappy that it hijacks the screen, but not awful I guess?
jug 7mo ago
I was thinking about creating charts of shame for this across some sites. Is there some browser extension that categorizes the data sources and requests like in a pie chart or table? Tracking, ad media, first party site content...? Would be nice with a piled bar chart with piles colorized by data category. Maybe you'd need one chart for request counts (to make tracking stand out more) and another for amount of transferred data.
sgbeal 7mo ago
> The user must perform visual triage, identify the close icons (which are deliberately given low contrast) and execute side quests just to access the 5KB of text they came for. They thing is, though... they _don't_ have to. It's been my standard practice for years to just tap ctrl-w the moment any web page pops up a model box. Some leeway is given to cookie dialogs _if_ they have a disagree/disable button _prominently_ visible, otherwise they're ctrl-w'd too. "Newsletter..." ctrl-w. "Please disable your..." ctrl-w. "Subscribe to read..." ctr-w. Ctrl-w is your friend.
t1234s 7mo ago
Author forgot to mention scroll hijacking on their list. This is one of the worst offenses.
cravo 7mo ago
[dead]
dormento 7mo ago
Ironically, this page is very slow on my laptop, not because of loading too much stuff, but due to the css effects. Running this on the dev console makes it snappy again: let allElements = document.querySelectorAll('\*'); allElements.forEach(element => { element.style.filter = 'none'; element.style.backdropFilter = 'none'; });
HumblyTossed 7mo ago
They must pay really well, because, as a dev, how would you want to do that?
deleted 7mo ago
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rayiner 7mo ago
The newest thing is “please wait a minute while Cloudflare decides you’re not a bot.” So you sit through that, then deal with the GPDR banner, then you get to watch an ad.
nich_kyson 7mo ago
Recently I've read a survey that claimed that one of the websites they reviewed shipped 50 mg of CSS.
AndreyK1984 7mo ago
I started writing in a Dioxus (rust framework) style. max 1KB of js code. Sending the diff via WebSocket from the rust server, and , what is more important, all code is now on a server, and because of websocket and rust it executes almost same speed as on the client. Back to normal pages sizes. And, of course, virtual scrolling everywhere.
AtNightWeCode 7mo ago
Another reason for this is that often the non-tech people can inject third party scripts via CMS, GTM and so on. I remember once we had a large drop in indexed pages on Google and it turned out that a script had moved our entire site into an iframe. The marketing people who injected it was like "it is just a script".
bigbuppo 7mo ago
The layout of news sites peaked with cnn.com back in the 1998 to 2002 timeframe. It's been downhill ever since.
thatmf 7mo ago
Imagine just paying for content
beanjuiceII 7mo ago
meanwhile everyone tells me i have to shave every KB off my web app
gugod 7mo ago
Bloated websites like this frustrated me especially when I have to use them from time to time. Oddly to me if they have never noticed donward trend of any engagement metrics, while removing any random section would seem to be helpful already.
dzonga 7mo ago
for anyone making sites - today don't be lazy - even if you need ads on your site there's a couple of server side setups which are just api calls and you just insert into the html without the javascript bloat example 'sponsored listings' on amazon. plenty of ad-networks that provide that 'native' experience
anarhackist 7mo ago
[dead]
brandonkal 7mo ago
GDPR cookie banners, GTM Bloat, Z-index warfare, and bloated SPAs etc created the perfect storm where ChatGPT is a better interface for most internet users. If I hit a web page I shouldn’t have to click through a labyrinth of junk to read the content. Even with the LLM hallucinating it is a better experience. Text in and text out. Like the internet was originally. We put up with the nonsense because we had to. But the irony is content creators are actively driving their audience away.
willywanker 7mo ago
This article is just the biggest justification for using an adblocker. Just imagine none of this nonsense affecting your system resources and user experience, just uninterrupted content. It's how I've been surfing since 1999. I get viscerally disgusted if I ever have to look at another person's laptop or phone screen.

857 points by kermatt 7mo ago

49mb web page? How about a 49meg go cli.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I've gotten tired of these "Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads, they should just put in ads that look pretty but pay almost nothing and supplement their income by working at McDonalds" takes.

ronsor 7mo ago
Well, I'm going to block the ads anyway (or just leave), so if they're trying to find profitable ads, they may need to revise their strategy.
- jdross 7mo ago
  “I’m going to either steal your work in a way you don’t consent to, or not consume it” isn’t really great. The alternative is paywalls
  - zoklet-enjoyer 7mo ago
    Much of their work consists of poorly sourced articles, sensationalism, disinformation, and bias to sway the audience.
    - Xenoamorphous 7mo ago
      Then the correct stance is to not visit those sites.
  - xigoi 7mo ago
    Steal? Their server gave me some HTML and it’s up to my user agent to present it however I want.
  - int_19h 7mo ago
    Anything that kills adtech faster is a good thing at this point.
decimalenough 7mo ago
I'm pretty sure people would read more and click on more ads if they didn't have to endure waiting for 49 MB of crap and then navigating a pop-up obstacle course for each article.
- Bratmon 7mo ago
  100,000 people clicking at $0.01 CPM is way worse for them than 10,000 people clicking at $2 CPM.
bsjshshsb 7mo ago
49MB or homelessness? There is surely other options.
- hilbert42 7mo ago
  Solution, see my post. ;-)
- surcap526 7mo ago
  [dead]
- Bratmon 7mo ago
  If you can think of any, then congratulations! You've saved journalism! You should probably tell someone so the knowledge doesn't die with you.
  - pocksuppet 7mo ago
    48MB
    - Bratmon 7mo ago
      Which MB should they cut out? Bear in mind that any cut that reduces their CPM or rate of conversation to paid will have to also include an equivalent reduction in their staff.
      - bsjshshsb 7mo ago
        Maybe the old "speed the page up and fewer people will bounce" adage applies?
      - pocksuppet 7mo ago
        Reminds me of the recent discussion about how news websites have to get more shit as they lose users, but wait no they don't because nobody heard of a restaurant making worse food because people didn't want to eat there, because that would become a death spiral very quickly. (Can @dang explain why he decided to rate-limit me now?)
neya 7mo ago
This argument is valid if journalism was actually journalism instead of just ripping off trending stories from HN and Reddit and rehashing it with sloppy AI and calling it a day and putting in 4 lines of text buried inside 400 ads.
- pibaker 7mo ago
  I don't like the state of journalism either but you realize this is a vicious cycle, no? People not paying for news (by buying newspaper, or more importantly paying for classified ads) leading to low quality online reporting leading to people not wanting to pay for online news.
  - curtisblaine 7mo ago
    I never understand this type of comment. People don't pay for news so newspapers (which by the way have pay walls) are forced to degrade their service. It seems strange to me. If I have a restaurant and people don't want to pay for my food, making even worse food with worse service doesn't seem a good solution. If I write books and people don't buy them, writing worse books doesn't make my sales better. Why journalists are different? They sell a service for money like all the others, but for some reason they have a special status and it's totally understandable that they respond to bad sales with a worse product. And actually, somehow it's our fault as customers. For some reason we should keep buying newspapers even if we don't think it's worth to save them from themselves.
    - apublicfrog 7mo ago
      Using your analogy, if every restaurant in town had a problem where most people wanted to come in and get food for free (and it was an expectation in the industry) and people refused to go in and pay, everyone would be upset they could no longer go out to eat when there were none left. If nobody is interested in paying for their meal, you can't be shocked the ingredient and chef quality drops in turn.
      - curtisblaine 7mo ago
scared_together 7mo ago
In the case of the New York Times, they have subscriptions and many are willing to pay for their work - but their subscriptions are not ad-free.
- vesselapi 7mo ago
  This is what killed my willingness to subscribe to most outlets. If I'm paying, I expect the page to load in under a second with zero tracking. Instead you get the same bloated experience minus a banner ad or two.
curtisblaine 7mo ago
> Journalists shouldn't try to make their living by finding profitable ads I mean, they can absolutely try. That doesn't mean they should succeed.
hrmtst93837 7mo ago
[flagged]

decimalenough 7mo ago

This is why people continue to lament Google Reader (and RSS in general): it was a way to read content on your own terms, without getting hijacked by ads.

Cyphase 7mo ago
RSS and feed readers still exist! All hope is not lost.
- decimalenough 7mo ago
  Sure, I use Feedly myself, but RSS is increasingly marginalized. I use to follow blogs, but it's not usable for mainstream media, Reddit, HN, etc etc.
  - lightandlight 7mo ago
    > Reddit, HN Hacker News still has a feed (that's the only reason why I saw this thread). And Reddit gives you a feed for your subscribed subreddits.
    - KomoD 7mo ago
      You can also get feeds for any subreddit, user or post https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator.rss https://www.reddit.com/user/spez.rss https://www.reddit.com/user/spez.rss
  - 4k93n2 7mo ago
    something like RSSHub can be used in conjunction with your RSS reader and will generate feeds for sites that dont have them. RSS-Bridge is another option
fsflover 7mo ago
People should stop lamenting Google Reader and start using RSS. There are numerous threads about it on HN, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45459233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45459233

h4ch1 7mo ago

This rubbish also exists disproportionately for recipe pages/cooking websites as well. You have 20 ads scattered around, an autoplaying video of some random recipe/ad, 2-3 popups to subscribe, buy some affiliated product and then the author's life story and then a story ABOUT the recipe before I am able to see the detailed recipe in the proper format. It's second nature to open all these websites in reader mode for me atp.

jopsen 7mo ago
Good sites do exist. It's just that they drown.
- h4ch1 7mo ago
  True, these ad heavy cooking sites also dabble extensively in SEOmaxxing their way to the top.
- nativeit 7mo ago
  I remember browsing the web in 1993-1994. It was literally a list of webpages. Yahoo was there, though, so presumably they've fallen farthest?

ray023 7mo ago

I think it's a GOOD thing, actually. Because all these publications a dying anyway. And even if your filter out all the ad and surveillance trash, you are left with trash propaganda and brain rot content. Like why even make the effort of filtering out the actual text from some "journalist" from these propaganda outlets. It's not even worth it. If people tune out only because how horrible the sites are, good.

hax0ron3 7mo ago
I think that unless one is well-connected or is willing to pay significant money, time, and/or effort to obtain high-quality information, one will still generally get more accurate information about the world by reading between the lines of the propaganda than one would by not reading the propaganda at all.

hilbert42 7mo ago

These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort. Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript. We'll simply cut the headlines from the offending website and past it into a search engine and find another site with the same or similar info but with easier access. I no longer think about it as by now my actions are automatic. Rarely do I find an important story that's just limited to only one website, generally dozens have the story and because of syndication the alternative site one selects even has identical text and images. My default browsing is with JavaScript defaulted to "off" and it's rare that I have to enable it (which I can do with just one click). I never see Ads on my Android phone or PC and that includes YouTube. Disabling JavaScript on webpages nukes just about all ads, they just vanish, any that escape through are then trapped by other means. In ahort, ads are optional. (YouTube doesn't work sans JS, so just use NewPipe or PipePipe to bypass ads.) Disabling JavaScript also makes pages blindingly fast as all that unnecessary crap isn't loaded. Also, sans JS it's much harder for websites to violate one's privacy and sell one's data. Do I feel guilty about skimming off info in this manner? No, not the slightest bit. If these sites played fair then it'd be a different matter but they don't. As they act like sleazebags they deserve to be treated as such.

CalRobert 7mo ago
Do you think youtube will continue to make it possible to use alternate clients, or eventually go the way of e.g. Netflix with DRM so you're forced to use their client and watch ads?
- curtisblaine 7mo ago
  Big tech will slowly enforce "secure browsing" and "secure OS" in a way that will make it impossible to browse the web without a signed executable approved by them. DRM is just a temporary stopgap.

napolux 7mo ago

and the NYT web team was praised as one of the best in the world some (many?) years ago.

gnabgib 7mo ago
Some of them are good (formerly Richard Harris - Svelte[0]) some of them should stop podcasting. [0]: https://svelte.dev/ https://svelte.dev/
keane 7mo ago
previously: nytlabs.com https://web.archive.org/web/20191025052129/http://nytlabs.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191025052129/http://nytlabs.co... now: https://rd.nytimes.com https://rd.nytimes.com

mvrckhckr 7mo ago

Only major media can get away with this kind of bloat. For the normal website, Google would never include you in the SERPs even if your page is a fraction of that size.

galphanet 7mo ago

This is just the top of the iceberg. Don't get me started on airlines websites (looking at you Air Canada), where the product owner, designers, developers are not able to get a simple workflow straight without loading Mb of useless javascript and interrupt the user journey multiple times. Give me back the command line terminal like Amadeus, that would be perfect. How can we go back to a Web where websites are designed to be used by the user and not for the shareholders?

bigfatkitten 7mo ago
> How can we go back to a Web where websites are designed to be used by the user and not for the shareholders? Or for developers to pad their CV.
niccl 7mo ago
Sadly, I think the only answer is some other form of payment than ad clicks. I've no idea what that could be, though.
userbinator 7mo ago
How can we go back to a Web where websites are designed to be used by the user and not for the shareholders? Loudly oppose the trendchasing devs who have been brainwashed into the "newer is better" mindset by Big Tech. I'm sure the shareholders would want to reduce the amount they spend on server/bandwidth costs and doing "development and maintenance" too. Simple HTML forms can already make for a very usable and cheap site, yet a whole generation of developers have been fed propaganda about how they need to use JS for everything.
ngruhn 7mo ago
> Don't get me started on airlines websites You can't beat China Southern . They have the most dog shit website I've ever seen. The flight was fine but I gave up doing online check in after 3 attempts. Never mind the bloat: - required text fields with wrong or missing labels. One field was labeled "ticket no.". It kept getting rejected. I randomly tried passport number instead. It worked. - sometimes fields only have a placeholder that you can't fully read because the field has not enough width ("Please enter the correct...") and the placeholder disappears once you start typing. - date picker is randomly in Chinese - makes you go through multi step seat selection process only to tell you at the end that seat selection is not possible anymore. - signed up with email; logged out and went back to the SAME login page; now sign up via phone number is required!?

PunchyHamster 7mo ago

Our developers managed to run around 750MB per website open once. They have put in ticket with ops that the server is slow and could we look at it. So we looked. Every single video on a page with long video list pre-loaded a part of it. The single reason the site didn't ran like shit for them is coz office had direct fiber to out datacenter few blocks away. We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit of connection speed, anything more and they just make nonsense out of it.

ceejayoz 7mo ago
Same for fancy computers. Dev on a fast one if you like, but test things out on a Chromebook.
- Joel_Mckay 7mo ago
  Based on the damage rate for company laptop screens, one can usually be sure anything high-end will be out of your own pocket. =3
- mananaysiempre 7mo ago
  “Craptop duty”[1]. (Third time in three years I’m posting an essentially identical comment, hah.) [1] https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/ https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/
  - tom1337 7mo ago
    I now wonder if it'd be a good idea to move our end to end tests to a pretty slow vm instead of beefy 8 core 32gb ram machine and check which timeouts will be triggered because our app may have been unoptimized for slower environments...
    - bombcar 7mo ago
      It’s worth doing at least sometimes; schedule an over The Weekend-to-Weekend test on slow hardware and log the issues. Even if you don’t fix them, knowing where the weak points are is valuable for when they do snap in production.

Crowberry 7mo ago

I hate this trend of active distraction. Most blogs have a popup asking you to subscribe as soon as you start scrolling. It’s as if everyone designed their website around the KPI of irritating your visitors and getting them to leave ASAP.

Anamon 7mo ago
Those are probably at the top of my website annoyances list. "Want to get more like this in your inbox?" -- I don't even know what "this" is, you barely let me read the first paragraph before asking! I'm sure the conversion rate of those things is being tracked, but somehow I can't believe that would even lead to a single newsletter signup. Who on Earth feels like they're not receiving enough e-mails and subscribe to the first mass mailing that asks? Maybe some people whose browsers auto-fill their e-mail address and they click the wrong button to close the pop-over?

throwatdem12311 7mo ago

49mb web page? Try a 45mb graphql response.

zahlman 7mo ago

This site more or less practices what it preaches. `newsbanner.webp` is 87.1KB (downloaded and saved; the Network tab in Firefox may report a few times that and I don't know why); the total image size is less than a meg and then there's just 65.6KB of HTML and 15.5 of CSS. And it works without JavaScript... but there does appear to be some tracking stuff. A deferred call out to Cloudflare, a hit counter I think? and some inline stuff at the bottom that defers some local CDN thing the old-fashioned way. Noscript catches all of this and I didn't feel like allowing it in order to weigh it.

Gormo 7mo ago
It's likely a static site being hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which auto-inserts beacon.js.

cjs_ac 7mo ago

My family's first broadband internet connection, circa 2005, came with a monthly data quota of 400 MB. The fundamental problem of journalism is that the economics no longer works out. Historically, the price of a copy of a newspaper barely covered the cost of printing; the rest of the cost was covered by advertising. And there was an awful lot of advertising: everything was advertised in newspapers. Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist were a section of the newspaper, as was whichever website you check for used cars or real estate listings. Journalism had to be subsidised by advertising, because most people aren't actually that interested in the news to pay the full cost of quality reporting; nowadays, the only newspapers that are thriving are those that aggressively target those who have an immediate financial interest in knowing what's going on: the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and so on. The fact is that for most people, the news was interesting because it was new every day. Now that there is a more compelling flood of entertainment in television and the internet, news reporting is becoming a niche product. The lengths that news websites are going to to extract data from their readers to sell to data brokers is just a last-ditch attempt to remain profitable.

ivanjermakov 7mo ago
I remember getting punishment from parents for downloading 120MB World of Tanks update over metered home internet. Our monthly quota was 250MB. It was not that long ago, 2010.
- biotinker 7mo ago
  2010 was a couple years after YouTube enabled 1080p uploads. 250MB a month was insanely small in 2010.
  - ivanjermakov 7mo ago
    Third world country fo ya. We got home internet in ~2007 and I remember visiting friends to have exciting YouTube-watching activity.
- idop 7mo ago
  In the late '90s, a friend recommended I download some freeware from a website. It was 1.2MB. I told him "are you crazy? 1.2MB? It's gonna take a whole week!"

lousken 7mo ago

rule #1 is to always give your js devs only core 2 quad cpus + 16GB of RAM they won't be able to complain about low memory but their experience will be terrible every time they try to shove something horrible into the codebase

userbinator 7mo ago

I also use and like the comparison in units of Windows 95 installs (~40MB), which is also rather ironic in that Win95 was widely considered bloated when it was released. While this article focuses on ads, it's worth noting that sites have had ads for a long time, but it's their obnoxiousness and resource usage that's increased wildly over time. I wouldn't mind small sponsored links and (non-animated!) banners, but the moment I enable JS to read an article and it results in a flurry of shit flying all over the page and trying to get my attention, I leave promptly.

gxs 7mo ago
I would love for someone more knowledgeable in this space than I to chime in on the economics of this industry Are the few cents you get from antagonizing users really worth it? I suspect the answer is simple and that most users don’t give a shit I think it has to do a lot with when you came of age - I’m in my late 30s, I got my first tech job at 14 as a sys admin for a large school district, and every single developer, admin, etc that I knew was already going on about the free internet. As a result, I’ve never had a tolerance for anything but the most reasonable advertisements I think that ideology is necessary to care enough and be motivated enough to really get rid of ads, how fucking awful the websites are alone should be enough but for most people it isn’t

the_snooze 7mo ago

It's really hard to consider any kind of web dev as "engineering." Outcomes like this show that they don't have any particular care for constraints. It's throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall YOLO programming.

BoneShard 7mo ago
it's still engineering, just for different constraints - cost & speed.
nayroclade 7mo ago
There are plenty of web devs who care about performance and engineering quality. But caring about such things when you work on something like a news site is impossible: These sites make their money through user tracking, and it's literally your job to stuff in as many 3rd-party trackers as management tells you to. Any dev who says no on the basis that it'll slow the site down will get fired as quickly as a chef who get a shift job in McDonalds and tries to argue for better cuisine.

shevy-java 7mo ago

Ublock origin helps mitigate at the least a little bit here.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

mrb 7mo ago

Let's play a fun prediction: I ask HN readers what will be the page size of NYTimes.com in 10 years? Or 20 years? Want to bet 100 MB? 1 GB? Is it unthinkable? 20 years ago, a 49 MB home page was unthinkable.

aembleton 7mo ago
In 10 years - 100MB In 20 years - 20MB I think there'll continue to be growth in page sizes, but then maybe we'll consider efficiency, or the NYTimes shuts down and the 20MB page will be the liquidators selling the domain. Maybe we don't even use domains by then as everything is on an app.

dizzy9 7mo ago

I remember in 2008, when Wizards of the Coast re-launched the official Dungeons & Dragons website to coincide with the announcement of the fourth edition rules. The site was something in the region of 4 MB, plus a 20 MB embedded video file. A huge number of people were refreshing the site to see what the announcement was, and it was completely slammed. Nobody could watch the trailer until they uploaded it to YouTube later. 4 MB was an absurd size for a website in 2008. It's still an absurd size for a website.

vsgherzi 7mo ago

Modern web dev is ridiculous. Most websites are an ad ridden tracking hellacape. Seeing sites like hn where lines of js are taken seriously is a godsend. Make the web less bloated.

Jigsy 7mo ago
I agree with this. Just because a website can eat all my RAM doesn't mean it should...
wat10000 7mo ago
What really blows my mind is how unusable it is. How often do you visit a web site and there’s so much crap overlaid on the page that you can barely see the actual content? Surely that can’t be good for their ability to make money, yet they persist.

frereubu 7mo ago

When working at the BBC in the late 90s, the ops team would start growling at you if a site's home page was over 70kb...

snickerer 7mo ago

Allowing scripting on websites (in the mid-90s) was a completely wrong decision. And an outrage. Programs are downloaded to my computer and executed without me being able to review them first—or rely on audits by people I trust. That’s completely unacceptable; it’s fundamentally flawed. Of course, you disable scripts on websites. But there are sites that are so broken that they no longer work properly, since the developers are apparently so confused that they assume people only view their pages with JavaScript enabled. It would have been so much better if we had simply decided back in the ’90s that executable programs and HTML don’t belong together. The world would be so much better today.

coin 7mo ago
Stepping back, it's pretty ridiculous that I need to download executable code, often bloated, solely to view read-only content. Just render the thing on the backend and send it to the client.
- FridgeSeal 7mo ago
  But the web-dev-hype people told me that JS-heavy SPA’s (and associated designs) were faster and better for the user! I didn’t bother validating this, but I’m sure they wouldn’t lie or misinterpret!!
  - jiggawatts 7mo ago
    For me personally the most infuriating example of this is the Azure Updates[1] page, which in my job I need to check nearly daily to see what's reaching EoL, what's new, etc... A couple of years ago they redeveloped it as a SPA app. The original server-rendered version of it worked just fine, but it "had" to be made into an interactive client-side monstrosity that loads many times slower for "reasons". It doesn't even load successfully about a quarter of the time. It shows items in reverse order (entries from 2013 first), which is some sort of async loading bug. They will never fix this. It's been there for two years already, it'll be there for a decade more, mark my words. Then, it takes about a minute to load sometimes on a poor connection. The links are JavaScript and don't allow "open in new tab". Etc... All of this to enable client-side filtering, which is a non-feature nobody ever wanted. A simple server-side filter capability would do the same thing, faster. And anyway, the filtering is broken! If click the "New or updated" filter, it drops down an empty selection with no options. Clicking anything else doesn't change what is shown! While developing this over-engineered monstrosity, they took the original site offline for "maintenance!" Hilariously, despite Azure having multiple CDN products, the Azure Updates page doesn't correctly use their own CDN and marks almost everything as "no-cache; no-store" causing 2.5 MB (after compression) to be re-transferred every time, despite using unique signed URLs with SHA256 hashes in them! This is the state of web-dev in the 2020s: A multi-trillion-dollar software company can't hire developers that know anything else other than SPA web app development! This commonly used page has spectacularly poor web engineering, and this is from a company that sells a web app platform, a CDN, and the ASP.NET web app development framework! If they can't get it right, who can!? [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/updates/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/updates/

temporallobe 7mo ago

Even enterprise COTS products can have some of these issues. We have an on-premise Atlassian suite, and Jira pages sometimes have upwards of 30MB total payloads for loading a simple user story page — and keep in mind there is no ad-tech or other nonsense going on here, it’s just pure page content.

65 7mo ago

I worked at big newspapers as a software engineer. Please do not blame the engineers for this mess. As the article says news is in a predicament because of the ads business model. Subscriptions alone usually cannot cover all costs and ads will invariably make their way in. For every 1 engineer it seems like there are 5 PMs who need to improve KPIs somehow and thus decide auto playing video will improve metrics. It does. It also makes people hate using your website. I would constantly try to push back against the bullshit they'd put on the page but no one really cares what a random engineer thinks. I don't think there's any real way to solve this unless we either get less intrusive ad tech or news gets a better business model. Many sites don't even try with new business models, like local classifieds or local job boards. And good luck getting PMs to listen to an engineer talking about these things. For now, the bloat remains.

lambdaone 7mo ago

The article says "I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from." The answer is really simple and follows on from this article; the purpose of the app is even more privacy violation and tracking.

drnick1 7mo ago

It's almost criminal that the article does not mention network-wide DNS blocklists as an obvious solution to this problem. I stop nearly 100% of ads in their tracks using the Hagezi ultimate list, and run uBlock on desktop for cosmetic filtering and YouTube. I should really run some to tests to figure out how much lighter the load on my link is thanks to the filter. I also manually added some additional domains (mostly fonts by Google and Adobe) to further reduce load and improve privacy.

hilbert42 7mo ago
"…how much lighter the load on my link is thanks to the filter." Not done any rigorous tests but my experience has been rhat it can be lower than a tenth.
int_19h 7mo ago
It does indeed work pretty well today, but they have already developed ways to circumvent it. For example, serving ads from the same domain as the main page.
- drnick1 7mo ago
  AFAIK, YouTube has been doing that for years and uBlock has consistently adapted. It's also easier for Google to do that since it owns the ad network and doesn't need to verify ad prints are legitimate and not inflated by the third party that displays them.
  - int_19h 7mo ago
    The point is that you still need uBlock, this can't be done via DNS filtering. I expect this kind of stuff to become more common in the future if adblocker usage grows. It might be CDNs doing that, too.

jaredklewis 7mo ago

I just loaded the nytimes.com page as an experiment. The volume of tracking pixels and other ad non-sense is truly horrifying. But at least in terms of the headline metric of bandwidth, it's somewhat less horrifying. With my ad-blocker off, Firefox showed 44.47mb transferred. Of that 36.30mb was mp4 videos. These videos were journalistic in nature (they were not ads). So, yes in general, this is like the Hindenburg of web pages. But I still think it's worth noting that 80% of that headline bandwidth is videos, which is just part of the site's content. One could argue that it is too video heavy, but that's an editorial issue, not an engineering issue.

squidbeak 7mo ago
Why are we supposed to think it's normal to see videos on every page? Even where it's directly relevant to the current page, what's the justification in thrusting those 36.30mb on the user before they explicitly click play?
- jaredklewis 7mo ago
  I don’t think you are supposed to think anything. It’s a news site with a lot of auto-playing video. If you like that kind of content, great. If not, there’s lots of other websites with different mixes of content. I subscribe to the economist which has few videos and they never auto play. But that’s a question of taste. 5mb of JavaScript and hundreds of tracking assets is not.
Jap2-0 7mo ago
Is that with Firefox's built-in tracking prevention disabled?

binaryturtle 7mo ago

It would be less hypocritical if that critique of the situation wasn't posted on a website that itself loads unnecessary 3rd party resources (e.g. cloudflare insights). Luckily I use a proper content blocker (uBlock Origin in hard mode).

aembleton 7mo ago
Even with ad blocking, it's transferring over 200KB of data, half of which is to load a couple of fonts. Not terrible but the basic HTML is only 17KB.

WhitneyLand 7mo ago

The sad thing is, this is already a paywalled site. I’m afraid someone who wants to support professional journalism and agrees to pay ~$300/yr for an NYT subscription still gets most (all?) of this nonsense?

nativeit 7mo ago
It's certainly one of the reasons why I ended my NY Times subscription in 2024, and split that money between recurring donations to public media, Archive.org, and the EFF.

opengrass 7mo ago

Removing the round navbar in the other pages is unsettling.

xrd 7mo ago

I was really surprised when I went to book a flight on Frontier (don't judge me!) and a request from analytics.tiktok.com loaded. I have a lot of discomfort about that. Bloat and surveillance go hand in hand.

jackby03 7mo ago

Its a crazy goal , amazing , congrats. Its vanilla stack?

benbristow 7mo ago

Bit unfair, turned off my adblocker and ran NY Times website with cache disabled via Dev Tools, came to 3MB. Still pretty damn high but not 49MB. (Will say I'm in the UK so might be different across the pond).

aembleton 7mo ago
I'm also in the UK, and it came to 31MB. Then I turned off uBO, Firefox tracking protection, and rejected the cookie notice, and it went over 40MB.

ericra 7mo ago

Not only are loading times and total network usage ridiculous, sites will continue to violate your privacy via trackers and waste your CPU even when background idling. I've written about these issues a few times in the last few years, so just sharing for those interested: A comparison of CPU usage for idling popular webpages: https://ericra.com/writing/site_cpu.html https://ericra.com/writing/site_cpu.html Regarding tracker domains on the New Yorker site: https://ericra.com/writing/tracker_new_yorker.html https://ericra.com/writing/tracker_new_yorker.html

ajolly 7mo ago
This! I need some better browser extensions to just start suspending JavaScript after the pages been in the background for a period of time. I've tried all of the auto discard type extensions but yeah back on CPU usage is crazy

ksec 7mo ago

>I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from. So they could do exactly what they are doing on the web and may be even more but with Native code so it feels much faster. I got to the point and wonder why cant all the tracking companies and ad network just all share and use the same library. But on Web page bloat. Let's not forget Apps are insanely large as well. 300 - 700MB for Banking, Traveling or other Shopping App. Even if you cut 100MB on L10n they are still large just because of again tracking and other things.

socalgal2 7mo ago

Yes, it's 100% horrible. For me the solution is simple. If I click a link and the page is covered in ads and popup videos I CLOSE THE PAGE!!!! Vote with your behavoir. Stop going to these sites!

scosman 7mo ago

I opened a startup's page the other day, and their streaming demo video was 550mb

ezekiel68 7mo ago

An anecdote from an OG (me): The same phenomenon worsened during the DotCom Meltdown and the Great Financial Crisis. This accelerated desperation is a sign of the times; paying subscribers are likely cancelling due to current economic conditions.

diven_rastdus 7mo ago

[dead]

ahf8Aithaex7Nai 7mo ago

Oh yeah, that old topic. We’ve already discussed this back when text-heavy websites started reaching megabyte sizes. So I’m going to go look for the posts in this thread that try to explain and defend that. I’m especially looking forward to the discussions about whether ad blocking is theft or morally reprehensible. If those are still around.

workfromspace 7mo ago

I cannot even imagine browsing the internet or using my devices without Consent-O-Matic and NextDNS. with almost all options and filters enables ofc

jayseattle 7mo ago

[dead]

jlebar 7mo ago

Got to hand it to this guy, this page loads FAST.

Beijinger 7mo ago

"The Sticky Video Player Publishers love embedding auto-playing videos these days, which isn't really popular. You'll find mulitple forum, Reddit, HN, or Twitter threads about it. To make it somehow worse...when you scroll down, you think it would leave you as it leaves the viewport. No. It detaches, shrinks and pins itself to the bottom right of your screen and continues playing. It keeps the distraction going and as if teasing you, features a microscopic 'X' button with a tiny hit area (violating Fitts's Law)." Is there not way to stop this? The do not autoplay videos option often does not work.

aembleton 7mo ago
Blocking the domain of the video player works. For example, primis.tech you can add this to your uBO filter: ||primis.tech$domain=~primis.tech Primis is one of them, but there are a few of these companies. I can't remember them all.
Anamon 7mo ago
The no-autoplay feature in Firefox has been very reliable in my experience. Unfortunately, it has a few issues of its own (play/pause status on YouTube getting out of sync, or not being able to use wildcards in the whitelist so you have to unblock every artist or label on Bandcamp separately).

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

maho 7mo ago

Relevant and fun read: The Website Obesity Crisis (2015) https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

esher 7mo ago
Was about to add this too!

LandenLove 7mo ago

I recently had to switch to a Japanese LINE account to gain access to certain features. I had no idea how good I had it on my American LINE account. The Japanese account is covered with ads EVERYWHERE on the home screen and even in the chat area. I have no idea how this app is still popular in Japan. I would pay to remove the ads if I could. They also have their own tiktok and AI slop that I never knew about.

gingersnap 7mo ago

I'm thinking that I gonna start making all my webpages <1mb in size, and compensate that with adding windows 95 to each page load.

gherkinnn 7mo ago

[dead]

DorkyPup 7mo ago

Author here. Woke up in today to see this on the front page, thank you to the person who submitted it! Initially, my biggest fear was the HN "Hug of Death" taking it down. Happily, Cloudflare's edge caching absorbed 19.24 GB of bandwidth in a few hours with a 98.5% cache hit ratio, so the origin server barely noticed. The discussions here about DNS-level blocking and Pi-hole are spot on. It's interesting that the burden of a clean reading experience is slowly being offloaded to the user's network stack.

quectophoton 7mo ago
Out of curiosity, do you have (and want to share) stats about requests per second? It's always nice to know these things for future reference. No worries if not :)
- DorkyPup 7mo ago
  Sure thing! I don't have the exact instantaneous peak since Cloudflare groups historical data by the hour on the free tier, but the peak 60 minutes last night saw 70,100 requests. That averages out to about 20 requests per second sustained over the hour. Wish I could be more granular but hope that helps a little.
- firefoxd 7mo ago
  Not the author, but last year I wrote about my experience being on #1 on HN [0]. I created a visualization of the requests hitting my server. [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/surviving-the-hug-of-death https://idiallo.com/blog/surviving-the-hug-of-death
  - slashtab 7mo ago
    In Brave browser on Android device, the visualisation media(?) is blacked out. just wanted to give you a heads up.
    - firefoxd 7mo ago
      Thanks for letting me know. It seems like when Brave is set to aggressively block tracking, it also blocks the canvas since it could be used for fingerprinting a device. I'll see if an avg version is viable in the future.

voidUpdate 7mo ago

> "Does anyone even care about how their end-product appears to a user anymore?" Of course not. Its all about maximising shareholder value. The users aren't a consideration anymore

jakub_g 7mo ago

> 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data Just FYI how this generally works: it's not developers who add it, but non-technical people. Developers only add a single `<script>` in the page, which loads Google Tag Manager, or similar monstrosity, at the request of someone high up in the company. Initially it loads ~nothing, so it's fine. Over time, non-technical people slap as many advertising "partner" scripts they can in the config of GTM, straight to prod without telling developers, and without thinking twice about impact on loading times etc. All they track is $ earned on ads. (It's sneaky because those scripts load async in background so it doesn't immediately feel like the website gets slower / more bloated. And of course, on a high end laptop the website feels "fine" compared to a cheap Android. Also, there's nothing developers can do about those requests, they're under full the control of all those 3rd-parties.) Fun fact: "performance" in the parlance of adtech people means "ad campaign performance", not "website loading speed". ("What do you mean, performance decreased when we added more tracking?")

Cthulhu_ 7mo ago
I tried to fight against the introduction of GTM in a project I worked on; we spent a lot of effort on coding, reviewing, testing, optimizing and minimizing client-side code before our end-users would see it, and the analytics people want a shortcut to inject any JS anywhere? I didn't win that one, but I did make sure that it would only load after the user agreed to tracking cookies and the like.
- zbentley 7mo ago
  Yeah, it’s really hard to compete with a solution that takes engineers out of the loop. The biggest reason large orgs go so crazy with GTM is that it’s a shadow deployment pipeline that doesn’t require waiting for engineers to work a request, or QA, or a standard release process. And sure, better prioritization and cooperation with eng can make the “real” release processes work better for non-eng stakeholders, but “better” is never going to reach the level of “full autonomy to paste code to deploy via tag manager”. This is the same reason why many big apps have a ton of Wordpress-managed pages thougout the product (not just marketing pages); often, that’s because the ownership and release process for the WP components is “edit a web UI” rather than “use git and run tests and have a test plan and schedule a PR into a release”.

sodimel 7mo ago

Here's something I wrote in 2021: > Today, there's ~30 times more js than html on homepages of websites (from a list of websites from 5 years ago). It seems that this number only go up.

eviks 7mo ago

> users are greeted by what I call Z-Index Warfare Nice term! > Or better yet, inject the newsletter signup as a styled, non-intrusive div between paragraphs 4 and 5. If the user has scrolled that far, they are engaged. They're engaged with the content! There is no way to make some irrelevant signup "non-intrusive". It's similar to links to unrelated articles - do you want users to actually read the article or jump around reading headlines?

andypants 7mo ago
Z-index warfare is so stupid (the practice, not the name). It's not only with media publications, but ecommerce sites as well. There have been countless businesses that have lost out on my money because I clicked on their ad (good job!), start reading the product info on their website as it loads (that's basically a sale), and then the page finished loading with a barrage of popups for cookie consent, newsletter signup for a discount code, special offers, special sale, spin the wheel for a prize, etc. That's when I close the tab and forget about it.
- Fiveplus 7mo ago
  I concur. It is an incredibly stupid practice for an e-commerce portal to distract or burden their users with anything other than the product they're viewing. I'm like, "Buddy, you have a potential paying customer at your doorstep, all you have to do is not insult them and they'll whip out their credit card on the next step."

leokennis 7mo ago

Every time some site or person tries to make me feel bad for using AdGuard DNS, ad blockers etc. I read an article like this and I feel fine. I see three options: 1. Show me reasonable ads and I will disable ad blocking 2. Do the crap described in this article and don't complain when I arm myself against it 3. Do a hard paywall and no ads; force me to pay to see your content

basilikum 7mo ago
It's my device. I decide what I download, execute and display on my device. A website is free to offer me to download an ad and I am free to decline that offer. Demanding me to download anything on my device or even worse execute someone else's programs [JS] and claiming that I have a moral obligation to do so is deeply creepy.

trashb 7mo ago

One of the things I don't get is the economics of these trackers. Someone is serving this amount of data to every visitor. Even if you want to track the user as much as possible, wouldn't it make sense to figure out how to do that with the least amount of data transfer possible as that would dramatically reduce your operating cost? Perhaps size optimization is the next frontier for these trackers.

ktpsns 7mo ago
Traffic for the static payload is super cheap. And the insane amount of requests is handled easily by modern event-based architectures. The operation costs are most likely only a tiny amount of the overall economics of the tracker's buisness model. The generated tracking data is certainly worth an order of magnitude more then it takes to generate it.

net01 7mo ago

In the same vein, https://512kb.club/ https://512kb.club/ is a user-submitted website that features content under 512 KB in size! (blogs, news, etc.)

fixxation92 7mo ago

I actually feel offended with a download size this big, it's completely careless from the website owners

dannersy 7mo ago

This is about to get substantially worse as companies introduce more AI into their workflows.

throwawayffffas 7mo ago

> I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from. Apps don't have adblockers.

el_io 7mo ago
Most in-app Ads can be blocked with simply changing your dns. And most people don't even use adblocker when browsing normal site. I kind of had to tech my surrounding people to use adblocker.
- throwawayffffas 7mo ago
  Isn't that a much higher bar for most people? I don't even know how to change the dns on my phone, and I am not a typical user, I am a dev. But running a browser that blocks ads like duckduckgos is super simple. But yeah I am sure there are additional tracking and possibly retention benefits.

donohoe 7mo ago

I started on this when project when I was at The New Yorker. I had just manage to convince people to give us space to do web performance optimization - and then we had to drop it quickly to work on AMP. Very frustrating. This site was created to give developers and pms some ammunition to work on improving load speed https://webperf.xyz/ https://webperf.xyz/

carlosjobim 7mo ago
The leader https://nautil.us https://nautil.us on your board is incredibly fast!
- Nine99 7mo ago
  [dead]
Fiveplus 7mo ago
Great project and we definitely need to maintain these public lists. Well done!

WesMakesThings 7mo ago

[dead]

My_Name 7mo ago

This is why I have a pi-hole and a selection of addons for my browser. I am considering moving to technitium though, it seems better featured.

fireflash38 7mo ago

You want to know why so many people either jump straight to comments or use alternate sources (archive, llms)? Because if you load the actual site, it freaking blows to use the damn thing. So much hostile user design. Edit: NPR gets a little shout out for being able to close their annoying pop-ups by clicking anywhere that's not the notification. So it's still crappy that it hijacks the screen, but not awful I guess?

jug 7mo ago

I was thinking about creating charts of shame for this across some sites. Is there some browser extension that categorizes the data sources and requests like in a pie chart or table? Tracking, ad media, first party site content...? Would be nice with a piled bar chart with piles colorized by data category. Maybe you'd need one chart for request counts (to make tracking stand out more) and another for amount of transferred data.

sgbeal 7mo ago

> The user must perform visual triage, identify the close icons (which are deliberately given low contrast) and execute side quests just to access the 5KB of text they came for. They thing is, though... they _don't_ have to. It's been my standard practice for years to just tap ctrl-w the moment any web page pops up a model box. Some leeway is given to cookie dialogs _if_ they have a disagree/disable button _prominently_ visible, otherwise they're ctrl-w'd too. "Newsletter..." ctrl-w. "Please disable your..." ctrl-w. "Subscribe to read..." ctr-w. Ctrl-w is your friend.

t1234s 7mo ago

Author forgot to mention scroll hijacking on their list. This is one of the worst offenses.

cravo 7mo ago

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dormento 7mo ago

Ironically, this page is very slow on my laptop, not because of loading too much stuff, but due to the css effects. Running this on the dev console makes it snappy again: let allElements = document.querySelectorAll('\*'); allElements.forEach(element => { element.style.filter = 'none'; element.style.backdropFilter = 'none'; });

HumblyTossed 7mo ago

They must pay really well, because, as a dev, how would you want to do that?

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rayiner 7mo ago

The newest thing is “please wait a minute while Cloudflare decides you’re not a bot.” So you sit through that, then deal with the GPDR banner, then you get to watch an ad.

nich_kyson 7mo ago

Recently I've read a survey that claimed that one of the websites they reviewed shipped 50 mg of CSS.

AndreyK1984 7mo ago

I started writing in a Dioxus (rust framework) style. max 1KB of js code. Sending the diff via WebSocket from the rust server, and , what is more important, all code is now on a server, and because of websocket and rust it executes almost same speed as on the client. Back to normal pages sizes. And, of course, virtual scrolling everywhere.

AtNightWeCode 7mo ago

Another reason for this is that often the non-tech people can inject third party scripts via CMS, GTM and so on. I remember once we had a large drop in indexed pages on Google and it turned out that a script had moved our entire site into an iframe. The marketing people who injected it was like "it is just a script".

bigbuppo 7mo ago

The layout of news sites peaked with cnn.com back in the 1998 to 2002 timeframe. It's been downhill ever since.

thatmf 7mo ago

Imagine just paying for content

beanjuiceII 7mo ago

meanwhile everyone tells me i have to shave every KB off my web app

gugod 7mo ago

Bloated websites like this frustrated me especially when I have to use them from time to time. Oddly to me if they have never noticed donward trend of any engagement metrics, while removing any random section would seem to be helpful already.

dzonga 7mo ago

for anyone making sites - today don't be lazy - even if you need ads on your site there's a couple of server side setups which are just api calls and you just insert into the html without the javascript bloat example 'sponsored listings' on amazon. plenty of ad-networks that provide that 'native' experience

anarhackist 7mo ago

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brandonkal 7mo ago

GDPR cookie banners, GTM Bloat, Z-index warfare, and bloated SPAs etc created the perfect storm where ChatGPT is a better interface for most internet users. If I hit a web page I shouldn’t have to click through a labyrinth of junk to read the content. Even with the LLM hallucinating it is a better experience. Text in and text out. Like the internet was originally. We put up with the nonsense because we had to. But the irony is content creators are actively driving their audience away.

willywanker 7mo ago

This article is just the biggest justification for using an adblocker. Just imagine none of this nonsense affecting your system resources and user experience, just uninterrupted content. It's how I've been surfing since 1999. I get viscerally disgusted if I ever have to look at another person's laptop or phone screen.