4 ms·

"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data." Not really the point of the art

"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data." Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not truly relevant to the story) News sites are almost like lyric sites or recipe sites in this regard. The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit.

red_admiral 7mo ago
For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.
- AlienRobot 7mo ago
  People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.
  - mattw2121 7mo ago
    Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing. If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. I would actually flip your statement around. Today, many people feel entitled to be paid for sharing things on the Internet. In that sense, they are the newcomers. The original ethos was about sharing information simply because it mattered to someone else, and a few of us still believe that value has not gone away.
    - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
      > If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. Anyone can still do this today (I don’t know the legalities of publishing copyrighted lyrics though). Of course, the proportion of people who wanted to do that was much higher in previous decades. But we also spend much more time and bandwidth today than decades ago, so maybe it just wasn’t feasible to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
      - patates 7mo ago
        But in search results, you only find the sites that game the system to maximize their profits, while millions of other well-meaning sites get little to no traffic, and eventually people lose interest in maintaining an online presence. They move toward big silos like Instagram, platforms that just use their content to attract more ads. Ads do break the internet, or let's say, fundamentally change the model of how it works to the detriment of most people
        bandrami 7mo ago
        That's why we had (and for that matter still have) webrings.
      - skeeter2020 7mo ago
        >> Anyone can still do this today But no-one would ever find it - which might be fine - and that seems like a waste. >> to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing. This is a big change in perspective & expectation. The original web was not volunteers doing work for others, but humans voluntarily doing work to share with others.
        deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
        7mo ago
  - StableAlkyne 7mo ago
    > And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason And others feel they are entitled to passive income by hastily throwing together IP they did not create and do not own, apparently. Everything has to be a side hustle and everyone has to take their cut as a middleman these days.
  - dfxm12 7mo ago
    There's an asymmetry here. We aren't talking about ads like billboard ads or TV commercials. We're talking about creepy behavioral tracking, harvesting and selling.
    - PaulHoule 7mo ago
      ... and many other sins. I go to YouTube and see a lot of things that make me question the narrative that this is an advanced system that elicits user preferences, makes markets clear, allows competitors to enter the market, etc. The first ad I see if is for Chrome. Well I'm already using Chrome because sometimes Youtube punishes me for using Firefox. So the message is "lights are on and nobody is home", I mean, they can see the user agent and probably have deeper analysis that would indicate I'm not faking it. Next I get a sequence of three obvious scam ads. Trying to provoke the fear of dementia in elderly people unless you use this "one weird trick" or a crypto scam or something that's obviously a scam but no way I am going to sit through 45 minutes of droning to know what the punch line is. Then there are the saturation ads for things like car insurance that are always over-advertised because nobody wants to buy them (people wouldn't buy insurance at all if they didn't get it from their employer, or had to get it to drive a car or get a mortgage, etc.) These have internalized the form of the scam ads because they're surrounded by them. Finally after maybe 20 ads I see something I might want and think "do I send them an email that says I'm afraid they're a scam because they're advertising in a place soaked with scams, they've incorporated so many superficial characteristics of scams and that they should reconsider their advertising spend?" I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.
      - andrekandre 7mo ago
        > I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers. by hook or crook, people have things to sell and those platforms are the place to put up shop... (my opinion) most new products/services are garbage (hello temu and friends) so its not a surprise most ads are therefore garbage/frauds as well...
  - 542354234235 7mo ago
    No, its because greedy people try to make money off people. Ads are the reason the internet sucks. There could be a wikipedia like site for lyrics that would cost pennies to maintain and people who like music and contributing would add to it. But scummy sites making money will pay to be at the top of search results as an ad, so they can get people to click on their site that is full of ads, all while sucking up bandwidth and processing power. Why are their dozens of almost identicle recipes for every dish? Because each one is trying to extract money with ads. Why do they all have some long-winded story about how they grew up eating this recipe every 9/11 anniversary? So they have more space to shove ads. Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out. Do you know how much money they could make turning every wiki reader into a product for ads?
    - scblock 7mo ago
      I mean there kind of is: https://lrclib.net/ https://lrclib.net/
      - smcin 7mo ago
        Ok but on that site you can't search by lyrics. Only by title.
    - swiftcoder 7mo ago
      > Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out Technically, they already did a long time ago. Jimmy Wales spun up a for-profit arm using the wikipedia tech stack, and it's now everyone's least favourite ad-ridden pop culture wiki[1]... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)
  - not_the_fda 7mo ago
    You used to get the lyrics when you bought the music. Came in a nice booklet with the tape or CD, and then you would read along while listening to the music. Should be the same with streaming. If I can listen to the song, I should be able tho see the lyrics.
    - cortesoft 7mo ago
      All the streaming apps have this feature, though?
      - filleduchaos 7mo ago
        You can't possibly expect people griping about services to actually use them, now can you
  - the_af 7mo ago
    > People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them You're wrong. We pay for everything all the time. We pay for home internet (not cheap!). We pay for various subscriptions and streaming services. We pay for online tools. We pay for a TON of stuff. And we still get hit by tons of obnoxious, invasive ads regardless of how much we pay. And people call us pirates if we want to install and adblocker. Advertisers like to violate us; it's their business model. Stop parroting their lines, and stop defending bullshit.
  - marssaxman 7mo ago
    That's how the internet worked back when we were all excited about it. Giving things away for free is easy on the web; irritating people badly enough that you can squeeze money out of them is what takes effort.
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    In a proper world, searching for "band song lyrics" would take you ... to the band's website, where they'd have perhaps some ads for band-related things and the lyrics, right there. Copyright and SEO and other stupidity prevents the obvious solution from being the enacted one.
  - dspillett 7mo ago
    There is a huge difference between providing a service with adverts to pay for it, and what almost all lyric sites are. They don't just put up ads and the related opportunities for adtech to stalk us in order to pay for the server and bandwidth: they spend time and money (SEO, sometimes more active advertising themselves) seeking out more and more visits to extract more revenue from that stalking and advertising relationship. And the have few standards on the sort of 3rd parties they deal with: last time I found myself on such a site and some things got through my blocking, the ads shown wouldn't have looked out of place on a porn site. Selling ad impressions and stalking opportunities is the point of those sites, offering lyrics is just a way to do that.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - scubbo 7mo ago
    > for some reason Jeez, man. This is just sad.
  - keybored 7mo ago
    Why not? People will post apologia on behalf of ad corporations on the Internet, that too for free.
- sequoia 7mo ago
  This is broadcast publishing in a nutshell. Look at the early radio shows, they had names like "Alka-Seltzer Time," "The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour," "The General Motors Hour" and so on. It was explicitly "we are playing music to get you to tune into our advertisement." Free newspapers and alt-weeklies are the same. How are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them?
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    At least there was some connection there - if the experience for "the General Motors Hour" was absolute shit, it would get back to them. We have so many advertising intermediaries that it's basically impossible for anything to affect anyone, ever.
MattGaiser 7mo ago
They probably assume a regular would log in.
HexPhantom 7mo ago
I think your point about one-off visitors is key. If most traffic is coming from search/social, there's no real incentive to build a clean, loyal-reader experience
- PaulHoule 7mo ago
  ... when it comes to news, however, I am always winding up at the major newspapers (e.g. New York Times) from search and social.
wat10000 7mo ago
I'd say that very much ties into the point of the article. The fact that turning off a major component of your browser significantly improves the experience is damning. That means they put tremendous effort (i.e. money) into deliberately making their readers' experience worse.
lapcat 7mo ago
It depends. Some sites have a soft, client-side paywall and others have a hard, server-side paywall. NYT has the latter, so you can't get the full article text with JS blocked.
- everdrive 7mo ago
  Yep, that's true, and it feels like an intentional decision on the part of companies. Wider access, or higher margins?
jodrellblank 7mo ago
> "and 49 megabytes of data" This can go into "Things Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than" https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3175629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3175629 - comments from 2011 when the Yahoo.com homepage was ~220Kb https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843140 - comments from 2020
nicbou 7mo ago
> The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit. They operate a bit like restaurants in tourist areas
Rebelgecko 7mo ago
NYT usually blocks me from reading articles when I block JS
user3939382 7mo ago
I made a lyrics cli. “lyrics sublime santeria” boom you get a text file with the lyrics. Couldn’t deal with the garbage anymore.
m463 7mo ago
> are significantly better if you block javascript. lol. https://www.wsj.com https://www.wsj.com always shows me one line of text: Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker
- frogcoder 7mo ago
  Use uBlock Origin plugin instead. It sources from various block lists to block contents. Works great on most sites, youtube among them.
mancerayder 7mo ago
Brave + shields With nasty popups + block scripts will sometimes work without breaking the site. Chrome forces you to see ads and all the rest of it, Firefox is tolerable but I struggled a bit with enough settings and plugins, it's not as seamless.
abrookewood 7mo ago
I use uBlock Origin plus Firefox's Reader View. Honestly, just getting text sounds like heaven.
fuzzfactor 7mo ago
>Bose writes: >The reader is not respected enough by the software. In case people don't remember, things were a lot better when a web page contained only information, not actual software.

red_admiral 7mo ago

For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.

AlienRobot 7mo ago
People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.
- mattw2121 7mo ago
  Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing. If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. I would actually flip your statement around. Today, many people feel entitled to be paid for sharing things on the Internet. In that sense, they are the newcomers. The original ethos was about sharing information simply because it mattered to someone else, and a few of us still believe that value has not gone away.
  - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
    > If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point. Anyone can still do this today (I don’t know the legalities of publishing copyrighted lyrics though). Of course, the proportion of people who wanted to do that was much higher in previous decades. But we also spend much more time and bandwidth today than decades ago, so maybe it just wasn’t feasible to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
    - patates 7mo ago
      But in search results, you only find the sites that game the system to maximize their profits, while millions of other well-meaning sites get little to no traffic, and eventually people lose interest in maintaining an online presence. They move toward big silos like Instagram, platforms that just use their content to attract more ads. Ads do break the internet, or let's say, fundamentally change the model of how it works to the detriment of most people
      - bandrami 7mo ago
        That's why we had (and for that matter still have) webrings.
    - skeeter2020 7mo ago
      >> Anyone can still do this today But no-one would ever find it - which might be fine - and that seems like a waste. >> to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing. This is a big change in perspective & expectation. The original web was not volunteers doing work for others, but humans voluntarily doing work to share with others.
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      - 7mo ago
- StableAlkyne 7mo ago
  > And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason And others feel they are entitled to passive income by hastily throwing together IP they did not create and do not own, apparently. Everything has to be a side hustle and everyone has to take their cut as a middleman these days.
- dfxm12 7mo ago
  There's an asymmetry here. We aren't talking about ads like billboard ads or TV commercials. We're talking about creepy behavioral tracking, harvesting and selling.
  - PaulHoule 7mo ago
    ... and many other sins. I go to YouTube and see a lot of things that make me question the narrative that this is an advanced system that elicits user preferences, makes markets clear, allows competitors to enter the market, etc. The first ad I see if is for Chrome. Well I'm already using Chrome because sometimes Youtube punishes me for using Firefox. So the message is "lights are on and nobody is home", I mean, they can see the user agent and probably have deeper analysis that would indicate I'm not faking it. Next I get a sequence of three obvious scam ads. Trying to provoke the fear of dementia in elderly people unless you use this "one weird trick" or a crypto scam or something that's obviously a scam but no way I am going to sit through 45 minutes of droning to know what the punch line is. Then there are the saturation ads for things like car insurance that are always over-advertised because nobody wants to buy them (people wouldn't buy insurance at all if they didn't get it from their employer, or had to get it to drive a car or get a mortgage, etc.) These have internalized the form of the scam ads because they're surrounded by them. Finally after maybe 20 ads I see something I might want and think "do I send them an email that says I'm afraid they're a scam because they're advertising in a place soaked with scams, they've incorporated so many superficial characteristics of scams and that they should reconsider their advertising spend?" I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.
    - andrekandre 7mo ago
      > I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers. by hook or crook, people have things to sell and those platforms are the place to put up shop... (my opinion) most new products/services are garbage (hello temu and friends) so its not a surprise most ads are therefore garbage/frauds as well...
- 542354234235 7mo ago
  No, its because greedy people try to make money off people. Ads are the reason the internet sucks. There could be a wikipedia like site for lyrics that would cost pennies to maintain and people who like music and contributing would add to it. But scummy sites making money will pay to be at the top of search results as an ad, so they can get people to click on their site that is full of ads, all while sucking up bandwidth and processing power. Why are their dozens of almost identicle recipes for every dish? Because each one is trying to extract money with ads. Why do they all have some long-winded story about how they grew up eating this recipe every 9/11 anniversary? So they have more space to shove ads. Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out. Do you know how much money they could make turning every wiki reader into a product for ads?
  - scblock 7mo ago
    I mean there kind of is: https://lrclib.net/ https://lrclib.net/
    - smcin 7mo ago
      Ok but on that site you can't search by lyrics. Only by title.
  - swiftcoder 7mo ago
    > Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out Technically, they already did a long time ago. Jimmy Wales spun up a for-profit arm using the wikipedia tech stack, and it's now everyone's least favourite ad-ridden pop culture wiki[1]... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)
- not_the_fda 7mo ago
  You used to get the lyrics when you bought the music. Came in a nice booklet with the tape or CD, and then you would read along while listening to the music. Should be the same with streaming. If I can listen to the song, I should be able tho see the lyrics.
  - cortesoft 7mo ago
    All the streaming apps have this feature, though?
    - filleduchaos 7mo ago
      You can't possibly expect people griping about services to actually use them, now can you
- the_af 7mo ago
  > People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them You're wrong. We pay for everything all the time. We pay for home internet (not cheap!). We pay for various subscriptions and streaming services. We pay for online tools. We pay for a TON of stuff. And we still get hit by tons of obnoxious, invasive ads regardless of how much we pay. And people call us pirates if we want to install and adblocker. Advertisers like to violate us; it's their business model. Stop parroting their lines, and stop defending bullshit.
- marssaxman 7mo ago
  That's how the internet worked back when we were all excited about it. Giving things away for free is easy on the web; irritating people badly enough that you can squeeze money out of them is what takes effort.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  In a proper world, searching for "band song lyrics" would take you ... to the band's website, where they'd have perhaps some ads for band-related things and the lyrics, right there. Copyright and SEO and other stupidity prevents the obvious solution from being the enacted one.
- dspillett 7mo ago
  There is a huge difference between providing a service with adverts to pay for it, and what almost all lyric sites are. They don't just put up ads and the related opportunities for adtech to stalk us in order to pay for the server and bandwidth: they spend time and money (SEO, sometimes more active advertising themselves) seeking out more and more visits to extract more revenue from that stalking and advertising relationship. And the have few standards on the sort of 3rd parties they deal with: last time I found myself on such a site and some things got through my blocking, the ads shown wouldn't have looked out of place on a porn site. Selling ad impressions and stalking opportunities is the point of those sites, offering lyrics is just a way to do that.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- scubbo 7mo ago
  > for some reason Jeez, man. This is just sad.
- keybored 7mo ago
  Why not? People will post apologia on behalf of ad corporations on the Internet, that too for free.
sequoia 7mo ago
This is broadcast publishing in a nutshell. Look at the early radio shows, they had names like "Alka-Seltzer Time," "The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour," "The General Motors Hour" and so on. It was explicitly "we are playing music to get you to tune into our advertisement." Free newspapers and alt-weeklies are the same. How are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them?
- bombcar 7mo ago
  At least there was some connection there - if the experience for "the General Motors Hour" was absolute shit, it would get back to them. We have so many advertising intermediaries that it's basically impossible for anything to affect anyone, ever.

MattGaiser 7mo ago

They probably assume a regular would log in.

HexPhantom 7mo ago

I think your point about one-off visitors is key. If most traffic is coming from search/social, there's no real incentive to build a clean, loyal-reader experience

PaulHoule 7mo ago
... when it comes to news, however, I am always winding up at the major newspapers (e.g. New York Times) from search and social.

wat10000 7mo ago

I'd say that very much ties into the point of the article. The fact that turning off a major component of your browser significantly improves the experience is damning. That means they put tremendous effort (i.e. money) into deliberately making their readers' experience worse.

lapcat 7mo ago

It depends. Some sites have a soft, client-side paywall and others have a hard, server-side paywall. NYT has the latter, so you can't get the full article text with JS blocked.

everdrive 7mo ago
Yep, that's true, and it feels like an intentional decision on the part of companies. Wider access, or higher margins?

jodrellblank 7mo ago

> "and 49 megabytes of data" This can go into "Things Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than" https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3175629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3175629 - comments from 2011 when the Yahoo.com homepage was ~220Kb https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843140 - comments from 2020

nicbou 7mo ago

> The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit. They operate a bit like restaurants in tourist areas

Rebelgecko 7mo ago

NYT usually blocks me from reading articles when I block JS

user3939382 7mo ago

I made a lyrics cli. “lyrics sublime santeria” boom you get a text file with the lyrics. Couldn’t deal with the garbage anymore.

m463 7mo ago

> are significantly better if you block javascript. lol. https://www.wsj.com https://www.wsj.com always shows me one line of text: Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker

frogcoder 7mo ago
Use uBlock Origin plugin instead. It sources from various block lists to block contents. Works great on most sites, youtube among them.

mancerayder 7mo ago

Brave + shields With nasty popups + block scripts will sometimes work without breaking the site. Chrome forces you to see ads and all the rest of it, Firefox is tolerable but I struggled a bit with enough settings and plugins, it's not as seamless.

abrookewood 7mo ago

I use uBlock Origin plus Firefox's Reader View. Honestly, just getting text sounds like heaven.

fuzzfactor 7mo ago

>Bose writes: >The reader is not respected enough by the software. In case people don't remember, things were a lot better when a web page contained only information, not actual software.