8 ms·

This Page Is Why The Internet Sucks

133 points by mikecane 14y ago

claudius 14y ago
But somehow the author has to monetise the content, because the huge amount of bandwidth required to blurb out 1.6 MB on every access is not cheap. So he has to include some advertisements and then also content-like pictures, because people don’t like advertisements being the only pictures on a website.
philbarr 14y ago
Also annoying is that the page jumps around whilst the adverts load, making it hard to even read the text.
- smcl 14y ago
  This is something I see on The Guardian and it infuriates me no end. I end up randomly clicking on articles, even adverts (deliberate maybe?) accidentally as they load and shove what I wanted to click down the page...
  - oneeyedpigeon 14y ago
    Yes, The Guardian is particularly annoying in this regard. Such a shame because, compared to other newspaper sites, they do an awful lot of things very well indeed. It's particularly a problem with Appple devices which impose a horrible lag between input and action, and causes no end of problems - what the hell is up with that?!
lmm 14y ago
Anyone have a count of how big a "complete" page of this article itself - all 748 characters of it - is? I make 64kb for the html alone, but apples-to-apples means we should compare the rest of the assets too.
- shawabawa3 14y ago
  I did right click -> save page as and it came to ~700kb That gives him a ratio of ~1/1000 as opposed to the article he's complaining about's ~1/4000
  - shared4you 14y ago
    Yea, it's 683 KB in all for ~800 bytes of text! Looks like, TFA's author makes the same mistake he's complaining about!
lyndonh 14y ago
This is meant to be intentionally ironic, right ? Or "This Page..." is actually a self reference ?
- rejschaap 14y ago
  He did say he didn't have any solutions. I'd recommend getting inspiration from other blogs, https://svbtle.com/ https://svbtle.com/ for instance.
- ronilan 14y ago
  I think "this", in the scope of irony, is self referenced regardless of how it was defined globally.
Drakim 14y ago
On this blog there are 11 "share this" buttons, a huge pointless banner of mostly black space, and half a page worthwhile of text is followed by 5 pages of black space to allow for all the sidebar links. Is he being ironic?
- rjwebb 14y ago
  Does anyone even use those buttons?
  - nvr219 14y ago
    I use "tweet this" button but that's it
  - janlukacs 14y ago
    no one i know uses these buttons. haven't clicked one in my life.
  - danso 14y ago
    I'd say, yes. Whenever I have a somewhat read post on my blog, many of the tweets have the template content excerpt
  - Andrenid 14y ago
    I manage a few decently sized blogs for authors and bloggers. From all the checking I've done for these buttons, only Email To A Friend, Facebook, Twitter, and G+ are worth doing. The others might get 1-10 clicks vs the aforementioned few getting thousands of clicks (or hundreds for G+). I've gone to just putting Facebook/Twitter/G+/Email, as minimally as possible.
  - pointyhatuk 14y ago
    What buttons? (adblock)
    - obviouslygreen 14y ago
      Using Ghostery here... my initial perception of a site is always based partially on how many entries are blocked on load. I've seen pages with 20+ calls to outside sharing services; at that point, a little extra cynicism kicks in.
infoman 14y ago
and this is why cellphone apps rock! they keep it minimalistic
- lucb1e 14y ago
  Not for long man, not for long... But yes, right now they're really great for usability. Including disabled people; I travel together with a completely blind person together in the bus every day. He uses a computer with a screen reader at his job and at home. Mobile websites are by far the greatest to use. On a sidenote, HTML5 is hardly better than Flash here.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    HTML5 is hardly better than Flash here. Do most screen readers support Flash?
    - lucb1e 14y ago
      To some extent they try, but it's rather hard. As is Javascript, though JS is slightly better than Flash. I think JS will eventually become much better than Flash, but not very soon.
- Kesty 14y ago
  I've seen some of the new proposed ad-format for applications, they are a lot more intrusive than the one you will find on a webpage. And that is for a simple reason. On a webpage you can put more ads per page than on mobile. Say that on your webpage you have 15 different banners on every impression. That's 15 advertisers, with 15 different costs from the local Grocery Store to Coca Cola. Now on your app you have 1 or 2 banner. The cost of producing the content is the same, but you have 15 times less advertisers, you have to make the ads cost alot more. And to justify that they will be very very intrusive, so much that old web popups seem nice in comparison.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Ratios for this article: 713 characters of content (43 kb if you include the screenshot), total page size: 898 kb. Edit: adjusted sizes to correct for errors due to caching.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- film42 14y ago
  I just did this myself: 765 characters including the title. With caching, it's around 680kb.
nkozyra 14y ago
This blurb was painful to read. The entire page, sans Adblock-able advertisements is 900KB-1MB. Granted, that includes: The site's scripts - which can ostensibly increase usability Images - which help tell the story, establish branding and increase usability Stylesheets - which make a page visually appealing and increase usability. If you want to complain about the state of the Web, at least take into the account that the Web/Hypertext is about more than just text.
- paranoiacblack 14y ago
  > If you want to complain about the state of the Web, at least take into the account that the Web/Hypertext is about more than just text. Yeah, I was wondering about this. Is he advocating turning the entire web into a text file? How does that even work with content rich websites like twitter or facebook or JS-necessary sites like your favorite music/video streaming site? Yes, encoding text with other technologies to increase the user's experience is going to make your file size bigger, but who cares?
  - nkozyra 14y ago
    It works poorly. The author makes the mistake in saying that everything that is not text is unnecessary and/or advertisement. There's a lot of cruft on most Web pages, but there's also a lot of valuable non-text info.
AndrewDucker 14y ago
I have wondered about this. Sites are definitely growing much, much larger as time goes one. But then the front page of HN is just 24k, while the front page of the BBC is 112kb, without any of the images. What's the easiest way of measuring the complete "load" of a page?
- zokier 14y ago
  > What's the easiest way of measuring the complete "load" of a page? Firebugs net panel shows how much data the page pulls down, and how long it took to do it.
belorn 14y ago
My browser is looking like windows did during XP. Back then, I had a anti virus, a couple of anti-adware, one anti hacking and a firewall installed. After XP, most of that got built in while the momentum of adwares and viruses/worms went down, and today I only got a anti-virus, and even that one is not even doing much (no warnings for the last few years). My browser however got adblock + extension, noscript, ghostery, https-everywhere, cookie handler, and I have also dabbled with privoxy. One can also add tor to the list. So I guess, the question will be if the browser manufacturers will do the same as microsoft did and start having a bunch of that built in. Debian-live CD has already started with having adblock pre-installed.
- leephillips 14y ago
  If you wind up using Privoxy, it can take the place of all the other add-ons you mentioned, except https-everywhere. And it works transparently for all browsers.
danso 14y ago
It's not the "page" that's the problem, it's the CMS. The linked-to article by the OP may only be 400 bytes, but that website (presumably) template is meant to scale for content of 40-400,000 bytes. Would it be nice if there was a way to scale down extraneous files dependent on the actual content size...sure...but then you'd have developers and designers complaining about all the movable parts in the CMS (i.e. you'd basically be designing a site for different article sizes...for each of the different browsers you already design for...so multiply your template work by at least 2).
nvr219 14y ago
This is why whenever I open an article or blog post, the first thing I do before even trying to read the article is click the "readability" button (or pocket/instapaper/safari reader/whichever one you like). I appreciate what the person above said "take into the account that the Web/Hypertext is about more than just text." That's fine. But unless I'm on my tumblr dashboard, I'm visiting a blog probably to read text. Branding is important, sure. But you can have great branding and still be readable. You don't need huge style sheets, you don't need a ton of images, you don't need a ton of scripts. Look at Svbtle for example, right? So what's the problem? "Monetizing content, especially written content, is extremely difficult. I think Svbtle’s biggest innovation will be in this area, but I don’t know what it is yet."[1] So what's the solution? First of all I love that _most_ of the personal blogs on HN lead by example. Secondly I think adblock and noscript should be encouraged whenever possible (I know there's no way adblock would be rolled in to browsers). Thirdly get native "reader" button in Chrome, FF and IE. Content creators need to make money but until we figure that out, we can't expect users to stare at disgusting web sites for much longer. Or maybe we can, if the state of TV and FM radio advertising teaches us anything... Maybe that's it, most people just deal with it so who cares. Still makes me sad though. I googled for a list of "top blogs" and found this list[2], amazing how many of them are visually DISGUSTING. 1: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/08/with-funding-for-svbtle-dustin-curtis-wants-to-build-a-business-in-long-form-online-content/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/08/with-funding-for-svbtle-dus... 2: http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/ http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/
shawabawa3 14y ago
The real problem with that page is that as far as I can tell, the entire article is a lie. Some googling on "Barry Clams" only comes up with the daily mash as sources, and the daily mash doesn't list any sources. edit: No relevant results for "barry clams" -thedailymash barry clams -thedailymash bond clams -thedailymash fleming clams -thedailymash edit2: oops, apparently the daily mash is satire by the way, jasoncartwright, your reply is "dead"
- jasoncartwright 14y ago
  Ha! The 'about' page states "The Daily Mash is a satirical website which publishes spoof articles – i.e. it is all made-up and is not intended, in any way whatsoever, to be taken as factual" Current headlines on the homepage include... "Miliband [UK Labour party leader] not even good at masturbating" "Beliebers wondering if Nazi persecution would change their taste in pop stars" "Middle class man convinced builders like him"
- danielsamuels 14y ago
  The Daily Mash is the UKs version of The Onion.
scottcanoni 14y ago
Even the website that is referenced to count the letters, lettercount.com, is guilty of fluff and bloat.
Jabbles 14y ago
To experience the full effect, disable your adblocker.
jpswade 14y ago
No. The Internet is fine. It's just some websites that suck. What next? - This Monitor Is Why Electricity Sucks. - This Truck Is Why Roads Suck. - This Toilet Is Why Water Sucks. - This Man Is Why Earth Sucks.
- bpatrianakos 14y ago
  This comment is why communication sucks. Edit: (I'm kidding, not being mean)
paparush 14y ago
Somebody has to pay for the electricity to move all these bits and bytes around the infrastructure that someone had to pay for.
drdaeman 14y ago
"Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_pigs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_pigs I believe, one can replace "security" with "correctness", "compactness", "simplicity", "low signal-to-noise ratio", "openness", "freedom" or many other terms, and the statement will still remain true.
aaron695 14y ago
Ummm I'm not sure a parody site is the best example to be using. A 400 byte joke is kinda boring without all the pics and ads around it. Still not really funny at all.....
throwawayG9 14y ago
This is how I see it: http://i.imm.io/12Y11.jpeg http://i.imm.io/12Y11.jpeg
richorama 14y ago
Wait a minute, your page saves to 1.28MB, and you only have 133 words in your article. This gives you 10kb of download per word. The article you’re pointing to is only 4kb per word. Pot calling kettle?
dreen 14y ago
Apparently the joke is lost on HN readers, The Daily Mash is a parody site, it parodies news sites (specifically tabliod ones in UK, its kind of like The Onion). You would not expect a clear form from them - In fact, whether intentional or not, the overbloat would actually be a parody itself, and of the very thing bitched about in the article.
leephillips 14y ago
He forgot the most important reason why "the internet" sucks, even though the page he's complaining about flaunts a prominent example: stealing content. Check out the unsourced photograph of the two actors. Actually, a second look at all the fluff on the page shows that much of it is itself poking fun at typical bloated websites with cheesy advertising, so this turns out to be a complicated example.
lucb1e 14y ago
This has been my point for years, and it has only gotten worse. Right now I'm thinking of writing an addon that simply blocks all third-party content (not just cookies), removes any divs that have a className or ID containing "share", removes comments after the first 100 (5000 comments and no pagination is not exceptional), etc. Perhaps just ignore output after FirstH1TagOnPage.ParentNode.Endtag.PositionInDataStream. I think my site does alright, sameless plug: https://lucb1e.com/ https://lucb1e.com/. Note that it's hosted on low-end hardware; if you want to view loading times, append ?debug to the URL. Or should I even get rid of the share buttons on articles here? I don't think they're used much anyway.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- ay 14y ago
  A small (offtopic) comment on your blog entry about IPv6... /64 is not twice the IPv4 address space - it's twice the number of bits. This translates 2^32 times bigger than entire address space.
  - lucb1e 14y ago
    That's what I meant. I'll edit for clarity, thanks :)
- Kliment 14y ago
  Sounds very similar to readability.
  - lucb1e 14y ago
    Only without parsing all pages through a (rather slow) third party service, but yes parsing all outgoing HN links through Readability by default was another idea that never made it.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
brudgers 14y ago
"This" is the internet Google created. Not a catalog of all information, but a catalog of all the information which has been wrapped in monetization schemes. Use Google Search for "convert PDF to HTML." See page after page of links which Google might monetize alongside the paid advertisements it already has. Google makes it look like this is a difficult task, not a solved problem with a FOSS solution - Pdftohtml that ships in many Linux distros. Google obfuscates the most relevant information by burying it within links to discussions on Linux forums. Even though there's a fucking SourceForge page and it links to a Windows friendly version. The crap results increases the odds that the average user will click through a revenue generating link either directly on Google's page or on a site running their ads.
- cromwellian 14y ago
  Google didn't invent Web advertising and the page linked to doesn't have any AdSense ads. In fact, Google has restrictions against using too many ad networks or filling pages with too many ads, and that will cause your page to get down ranked.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- polyfractal 14y ago
  Search for "convert PDF to HTML linux" and you have a whole page of relevant, useful links. I don't understand your complaint. Google isn't making anything seem "difficult". They offer advertising space, and companies happen to sell pdf conversion software. Therefore, those ads show up on searches. It isn't Google's fault if the companies advertising pitch is "PDF Conversion is hard!". That's the company, not Google. Google hasn't forced the internet to do anything. The reason we have terrible pages like the one in the OP is because of the economics of giving away free content and relying on advertising. I'm not a huge fan of Google, but your complaint is pretty :tinfoil:
- mseebach 14y ago
  No, Google did not create attention-grabbing-for-money. Look in a good old yellow pages phone book: All those colourful, attention-grabbing ads diverting your attention from the small-print actual listings? They're paid for. Google merely made a very successful business out of making businesses willing to pay up slightly easier to find, roughly like the yellow pages did. Finally, on your "convert PDF to HTML" example: My first hit is PDFOnline.com, that has a nice, green button labeled "upload". When I use that button to upload a PDF document, the site generates a HTML document for me. It was quick, easy and it didn't ask for money. Totally passable for the top result for the query. pdftohtml was the fourth link - hardly outrageous for a terse, technically worded page. Oh and that Windows version (helpfully referred to as a "win32 GUI", because nobody calls it "windows" anyway) that it linked to? The link is dead.
kingmanaz 14y ago
As an AmigaOS 3.1 stalwart unable to view HTML5 content, I’d love to see an Internet partially based upon a TeX-like markup. Rather than “<!DOCTYPE html>”, such a document would use “<!DOCTYPE typeset>”. An alternative browser would parse and present the markup when either the doctype is encountered, or a “.ts” extension is linked to. Typeset content would be displayed using the traditional tricks of typesetting: kerning, proper justification, avoidance of rivers, optimal reading line-length, etc. Here’s a sample of what the web could be: http://i.stack.imgur.com/W9uon.jpg http://i.stack.imgur.com/W9uon.jpg . More often than not, today’s Web is gaudy and garish, as 99% of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript’s functionality is unneeded for everyday reading. For plain reading a Typeset browser and typesetting-friendly markup would an improvement over the status quo, wherein every man reinvents the art of typesetting at his website, and often with tragic results.
- ChrisLTD 14y ago
  This is why Instapaper and similar services have a market. We should be thankful that enough of the web is parseable for these tools to work and not stuck in something like a Flash file.
  - drdaeman 14y ago
    Flash file is parseable too, just harder to parse. (And it still is, even if text is converted to curves.) The real problem is, websites are not much of documents anymore. Their parts are steadily moving up the Chomsky hierarchy, becoming programs.
- leephillips 14y ago
  Well, a good fraction of serious online content is in the form of PDFs created with LaTeX or a close relative. But it would be really interesting to have a browser that incorporated the TeX engine, and could typeset from TeX source to the current window width. And there is recent progress on javascript implementations of TeX.
- nickzoic 14y ago
  Or you could just improve the text rendering engine of a normal HTML browser to do better typesetting. That'd make your HTML2.0 content look nice too! It isn't like using TeX is any guarantee of niceness: http://www.ieee.org/documents/TRANS-JOUR.pdf http://www.ieee.org/documents/TRANS-JOUR.pdf
notjustanymike 14y ago
I worked at newsweek and later The Daily Beast as a web developer in charge of analytics, so I can provide some insight into this. The product managers were under constant pressure to increase traffic, so they'd add every new feature that appeared in front of them. Facebook, comments, social crap, stock ticker (that -nearly- happened), it didn't matter. Each one of these did add a marginal amount of measurable traffic. Here's where the analytics part kicks in. The numbers did not reflect that our readers hated all that noise, and the product managers wouldn't dare remove something that generates traffic. So no matter how pointless something was, if it generated traffic it stayed for good.
- laumars 14y ago
  Did it generate more traffic, or were those extra hits just users tapping "refresh" because of page timeouts when trying to grab the larger sized site on a crappy 3G connection? (joke)
  - Kesty 14y ago
    It might be a joke, but is real. Adwise, the reason why you have more impression doesn't really matter.
lifeformed 14y ago
I wish I could pay for my web visits in real money instead of ad views. It'd be nice to get the experience of AdBlock without having to deprive content providers of revenue. It'd also be nice if people could design websites without giving prime visual estate to viewer annoyances. Maybe you could pick what percentage you distribute to your viewed sites, so you can support your favorite content providers. How much would it cost to offset my ad-less experience? It couldn't be that much, could it? Let's say the average website that I visit has 3 ads per page, with an average CPM of $2 per ad. That means every 1,000 times I visit those sites, I would need to pay $6. According to RescueTime, I spent roughly 16 hours a week on websites. If I spend 1 minute per page (a really rough guess), that's 960 views per week. Since I'm using really fuzzy numbers, the ballpark range is looking like $10-50 per month, probably around $20ish. That's doable, but it's pretty steep considering the alternative. I'm sure there are probably ways to reduce the cost that I'm overlooking.
- hipsters_unite 14y ago
  I've thought this for years. Something like Flattr, except, y'know, that works and people use.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
I've started using "why the internet sucks" as an indicator that the person writing may be more in love with a good rant than anything else. I don't think you can weigh the number of bytes you receive that are the message against the total weight of the page. Doesn't work like that. Facebook gives me a stream of people I know saying useless things. I consume maybe 4-5K of plaintext on it every day. Have any idea how much crap it pushes down the pipe? How much real-estate all the things I don't care about consume? A lot. Hell, the information isn't even that valuable. But still I consume it. It's way more complicated than the author makes out. If I wanted to know Abraham Lincoln's birthday and you put it in bold 48-point text in the center of the page, I'm spending 3 seconds reading it and I'm gone. The rest of the experience is just a waste of time and bytes on the part of the supplier. Who cares? ADD: It's not the crappy ads and social stuff that's the problem. It's sites using more and more techniques to subtly make you stick around. The subtle distractions, like a FB list of which friends also liked reading the particular article, or offering badges for participation, or tracking you across sites, that cause the most long-term trouble for folks. The big, glaring stuff is easy. People are used to that crap by now.
chewxy 14y ago
I've just moved and while my ISP is still setting up my internet, I'm using my phone's 3G for internet. Having a quota on the internet bandwidth, I created a minimal browsing profile: no images, no javascript, no flash. You'd be surprised how many websites are broken. Facebook, twitter, mashable, theverge all consistently consistently consumed hundreds of megabytes per page. When I used my minimal browsing profile, those sites were so much faster. Browsing reddit without being logged in shows how much junk is in reddit (no point clicking on links that go to imgur afterall). I suddenly found myself to be far more productive. In fact I think when I get my ADSL up again, I'm going to keep using the minimal profile
trotsky 14y ago
While stuck with the dreaded neighbor "hey, you're a computer guy" support visit It was a real eyeopener about the ux of crapware laden toolbar filled ie9 win 7 experience. No wonder some people just hate computers. What struck me the most was how she gets her email. FIOS set her up with their webmail, so she clicks on the bookmark, it shows a progress bar for 5 seconds while i assume it's pulling your customer info. Once that clears they showed a full page interstitial about some verizon product and i think lacked any skip button. Once that cleared they showed what amounted to an old school portal - about a third was verizon info/support/ok apps, but then the rest was filled with some crap news feed inserts a few product upsell teasers, and i think a third party ad or two. Ok click on email, normal login page, open email app. So this thing has a Verizon top banner that's huge, like 25% or 30% of her screen that is framed and never scrolls off. It takes two clicks just to make it show her inbox instead of a blank content area. The app wasn't terrible, just maybe circa 2002 or so with only a few of the controls disguising themselves as the background. Usable enough as long as you don't mind the actual mail/composer only getting about 25% of the screen real estate. The kicker was the timeout - "for her protection" it kills her idle session after somewhere around 10-20 minutes at which point it pops up a modal dialog about being logged out, then pops it up again after you hit ok. Then it's back to stage 1 (5 second progress bar) and the experience begins anew including the interstitial and submitting you email credentials again. I know telcos do some of the worst software engineering on earth, but jesus. No wonder some people consider the web as shitty and just want to get whatever task they need to use it for over with. And no, I didn't really do much to improve it aside from exiling the toolbars and some shittier than average bestbuy run at login crap ware. I feel shitty about not making it at least not terrible, but that's hours to set things up right + a few hours of instruction + then the support calls come :/ And then the neighbor she told the story to calls. It sucks that things like geeksquad are so shitty and are prone to upselling crap and exploiting technophobes. And I assume the it pro flier sector is at least as bad on average. Because if you're a novice and don't have a relative that's ok you're basically stuck. And yet I made her swear twice that she won't tell any of her friends that I helped her. [1] Ok, yeah, I guess I got a bit off topic there. But fios portal webmail is shitty.
- deleted 14y ago
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Groxx 14y ago
jha: then stop selling ads on this very page Reply by mikecane: I don’t. WordPressdotcom does so I can use it for free. I don’t see any of that money. Oh boy. Where to start...
- ctdonath 14y ago
  Yup. He responds to the "pot, kettle, black" observations with a whining "it's not my fault! it'd be better if I had my own server!" (someone point him to a cheap server, please).
  - nickzoic 14y ago
    * Wordpress.com plus $30/year to remove ads? * wordpress on a AWS microinstance (free for the first year, 'bout $100/yr after that)? * Cheapie shared host like asmallorange.com (better than you'd expect for $35/year) * Static blog tool (pelican etc) pushed into AWS S3 plus disqus for comments?
JacksonGariety 14y ago
The internet doesn't suck. People's lives suck around the internet.
chubbard 14y ago
"Gentlemen start your bitchin!1!!1!!"
njharman 14y ago
> And no, I don’t have a solution. AdBlock, duh!
evolve2k 14y ago
To be honest that awful big google sponsored banner ad that shows on your site ain't much better.

133 points by mikecane 14y ago

But somehow the author has to monetise the content, because the huge amount of bandwidth required to blurb out 1.6 MB on every access is not cheap. So he has to include some advertisements and then also content-like pictures, because people don’t like advertisements being the only pictures on a website.

philbarr 14y ago

Also annoying is that the page jumps around whilst the adverts load, making it hard to even read the text.

smcl 14y ago
This is something I see on The Guardian and it infuriates me no end. I end up randomly clicking on articles, even adverts (deliberate maybe?) accidentally as they load and shove what I wanted to click down the page...
- oneeyedpigeon 14y ago
  Yes, The Guardian is particularly annoying in this regard. Such a shame because, compared to other newspaper sites, they do an awful lot of things very well indeed. It's particularly a problem with Appple devices which impose a horrible lag between input and action, and causes no end of problems - what the hell is up with that?!

lmm 14y ago

Anyone have a count of how big a "complete" page of this article itself - all 748 characters of it - is? I make 64kb for the html alone, but apples-to-apples means we should compare the rest of the assets too.

shawabawa3 14y ago
I did right click -> save page as and it came to ~700kb That gives him a ratio of ~1/1000 as opposed to the article he's complaining about's ~1/4000
- shared4you 14y ago
  Yea, it's 683 KB in all for ~800 bytes of text! Looks like, TFA's author makes the same mistake he's complaining about!

lyndonh 14y ago

This is meant to be intentionally ironic, right ? Or "This Page..." is actually a self reference ?

rejschaap 14y ago
He did say he didn't have any solutions. I'd recommend getting inspiration from other blogs, https://svbtle.com/ https://svbtle.com/ for instance.
ronilan 14y ago
I think "this", in the scope of irony, is self referenced regardless of how it was defined globally.

Drakim 14y ago

On this blog there are 11 "share this" buttons, a huge pointless banner of mostly black space, and half a page worthwhile of text is followed by 5 pages of black space to allow for all the sidebar links. Is he being ironic?

rjwebb 14y ago
Does anyone even use those buttons?
- nvr219 14y ago
  I use "tweet this" button but that's it
- janlukacs 14y ago
  no one i know uses these buttons. haven't clicked one in my life.
- danso 14y ago
  I'd say, yes. Whenever I have a somewhat read post on my blog, many of the tweets have the template content excerpt
- Andrenid 14y ago
  I manage a few decently sized blogs for authors and bloggers. From all the checking I've done for these buttons, only Email To A Friend, Facebook, Twitter, and G+ are worth doing. The others might get 1-10 clicks vs the aforementioned few getting thousands of clicks (or hundreds for G+). I've gone to just putting Facebook/Twitter/G+/Email, as minimally as possible.
- pointyhatuk 14y ago
  What buttons? (adblock)
  - obviouslygreen 14y ago
    Using Ghostery here... my initial perception of a site is always based partially on how many entries are blocked on load. I've seen pages with 20+ calls to outside sharing services; at that point, a little extra cynicism kicks in.

infoman 14y ago

and this is why cellphone apps rock! they keep it minimalistic

lucb1e 14y ago
Not for long man, not for long... But yes, right now they're really great for usability. Including disabled people; I travel together with a completely blind person together in the bus every day. He uses a computer with a screen reader at his job and at home. Mobile websites are by far the greatest to use. On a sidenote, HTML5 is hardly better than Flash here.
- icebraining 14y ago
  HTML5 is hardly better than Flash here. Do most screen readers support Flash?
  - lucb1e 14y ago
    To some extent they try, but it's rather hard. As is Javascript, though JS is slightly better than Flash. I think JS will eventually become much better than Flash, but not very soon.
Kesty 14y ago
I've seen some of the new proposed ad-format for applications, they are a lot more intrusive than the one you will find on a webpage. And that is for a simple reason. On a webpage you can put more ads per page than on mobile. Say that on your webpage you have 15 different banners on every impression. That's 15 advertisers, with 15 different costs from the local Grocery Store to Coca Cola. Now on your app you have 1 or 2 banner. The cost of producing the content is the same, but you have 15 times less advertisers, you have to make the ads cost alot more. And to justify that they will be very very intrusive, so much that old web popups seem nice in comparison.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

Ratios for this article: 713 characters of content (43 kb if you include the screenshot), total page size: 898 kb. Edit: adjusted sizes to correct for errors due to caching.

deleted 14y ago
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film42 14y ago
I just did this myself: 765 characters including the title. With caching, it's around 680kb.

nkozyra 14y ago

This blurb was painful to read. The entire page, sans Adblock-able advertisements is 900KB-1MB. Granted, that includes: The site's scripts - which can ostensibly increase usability Images - which help tell the story, establish branding and increase usability Stylesheets - which make a page visually appealing and increase usability. If you want to complain about the state of the Web, at least take into the account that the Web/Hypertext is about more than just text.

paranoiacblack 14y ago
> If you want to complain about the state of the Web, at least take into the account that the Web/Hypertext is about more than just text. Yeah, I was wondering about this. Is he advocating turning the entire web into a text file? How does that even work with content rich websites like twitter or facebook or JS-necessary sites like your favorite music/video streaming site? Yes, encoding text with other technologies to increase the user's experience is going to make your file size bigger, but who cares?
- nkozyra 14y ago
  It works poorly. The author makes the mistake in saying that everything that is not text is unnecessary and/or advertisement. There's a lot of cruft on most Web pages, but there's also a lot of valuable non-text info.

AndrewDucker 14y ago

I have wondered about this. Sites are definitely growing much, much larger as time goes one. But then the front page of HN is just 24k, while the front page of the BBC is 112kb, without any of the images. What's the easiest way of measuring the complete "load" of a page?

zokier 14y ago
> What's the easiest way of measuring the complete "load" of a page? Firebugs net panel shows how much data the page pulls down, and how long it took to do it.

belorn 14y ago

My browser is looking like windows did during XP. Back then, I had a anti virus, a couple of anti-adware, one anti hacking and a firewall installed. After XP, most of that got built in while the momentum of adwares and viruses/worms went down, and today I only got a anti-virus, and even that one is not even doing much (no warnings for the last few years). My browser however got adblock + extension, noscript, ghostery, https-everywhere, cookie handler, and I have also dabbled with privoxy. One can also add tor to the list. So I guess, the question will be if the browser manufacturers will do the same as microsoft did and start having a bunch of that built in. Debian-live CD has already started with having adblock pre-installed.

leephillips 14y ago
If you wind up using Privoxy, it can take the place of all the other add-ons you mentioned, except https-everywhere. And it works transparently for all browsers.

danso 14y ago

It's not the "page" that's the problem, it's the CMS. The linked-to article by the OP may only be 400 bytes, but that website (presumably) template is meant to scale for content of 40-400,000 bytes. Would it be nice if there was a way to scale down extraneous files dependent on the actual content size...sure...but then you'd have developers and designers complaining about all the movable parts in the CMS (i.e. you'd basically be designing a site for different article sizes...for each of the different browsers you already design for...so multiply your template work by at least 2).

nvr219 14y ago

This is why whenever I open an article or blog post, the first thing I do before even trying to read the article is click the "readability" button (or pocket/instapaper/safari reader/whichever one you like). I appreciate what the person above said "take into the account that the Web/Hypertext is about more than just text." That's fine. But unless I'm on my tumblr dashboard, I'm visiting a blog probably to read text. Branding is important, sure. But you can have great branding and still be readable. You don't need huge style sheets, you don't need a ton of images, you don't need a ton of scripts. Look at Svbtle for example, right? So what's the problem? "Monetizing content, especially written content, is extremely difficult. I think Svbtle’s biggest innovation will be in this area, but I don’t know what it is yet."[1] So what's the solution? First of all I love that _most_ of the personal blogs on HN lead by example. Secondly I think adblock and noscript should be encouraged whenever possible (I know there's no way adblock would be rolled in to browsers). Thirdly get native "reader" button in Chrome, FF and IE. Content creators need to make money but until we figure that out, we can't expect users to stare at disgusting web sites for much longer. Or maybe we can, if the state of TV and FM radio advertising teaches us anything... Maybe that's it, most people just deal with it so who cares. Still makes me sad though. I googled for a list of "top blogs" and found this list[2], amazing how many of them are visually DISGUSTING. 1: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/08/with-funding-for-svbtle-dustin-curtis-wants-to-build-a-business-in-long-form-online-content/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/08/with-funding-for-svbtle-dus... 2: http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/ http://technorati.com/blogs/top100/

shawabawa3 14y ago

The real problem with that page is that as far as I can tell, the entire article is a lie. Some googling on "Barry Clams" only comes up with the daily mash as sources, and the daily mash doesn't list any sources. edit: No relevant results for "barry clams" -thedailymash barry clams -thedailymash bond clams -thedailymash fleming clams -thedailymash edit2: oops, apparently the daily mash is satire by the way, jasoncartwright, your reply is "dead"

jasoncartwright 14y ago
Ha! The 'about' page states "The Daily Mash is a satirical website which publishes spoof articles – i.e. it is all made-up and is not intended, in any way whatsoever, to be taken as factual" Current headlines on the homepage include... "Miliband [UK Labour party leader] not even good at masturbating" "Beliebers wondering if Nazi persecution would change their taste in pop stars" "Middle class man convinced builders like him"
danielsamuels 14y ago
The Daily Mash is the UKs version of The Onion.

scottcanoni 14y ago

Even the website that is referenced to count the letters, lettercount.com, is guilty of fluff and bloat.

Jabbles 14y ago

To experience the full effect, disable your adblocker.

jpswade 14y ago

No. The Internet is fine. It's just some websites that suck. What next? - This Monitor Is Why Electricity Sucks. - This Truck Is Why Roads Suck. - This Toilet Is Why Water Sucks. - This Man Is Why Earth Sucks.

bpatrianakos 14y ago
This comment is why communication sucks. Edit: (I'm kidding, not being mean)

paparush 14y ago

Somebody has to pay for the electricity to move all these bits and bytes around the infrastructure that someone had to pay for.

drdaeman 14y ago

"Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_pigs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_pigs I believe, one can replace "security" with "correctness", "compactness", "simplicity", "low signal-to-noise ratio", "openness", "freedom" or many other terms, and the statement will still remain true.

aaron695 14y ago

Ummm I'm not sure a parody site is the best example to be using. A 400 byte joke is kinda boring without all the pics and ads around it. Still not really funny at all.....

throwawayG9 14y ago

This is how I see it: http://i.imm.io/12Y11.jpeg http://i.imm.io/12Y11.jpeg

richorama 14y ago

Wait a minute, your page saves to 1.28MB, and you only have 133 words in your article. This gives you 10kb of download per word. The article you’re pointing to is only 4kb per word. Pot calling kettle?

dreen 14y ago

Apparently the joke is lost on HN readers, The Daily Mash is a parody site, it parodies news sites (specifically tabliod ones in UK, its kind of like The Onion). You would not expect a clear form from them - In fact, whether intentional or not, the overbloat would actually be a parody itself, and of the very thing bitched about in the article.

leephillips 14y ago

He forgot the most important reason why "the internet" sucks, even though the page he's complaining about flaunts a prominent example: stealing content. Check out the unsourced photograph of the two actors. Actually, a second look at all the fluff on the page shows that much of it is itself poking fun at typical bloated websites with cheesy advertising, so this turns out to be a complicated example.

lucb1e 14y ago

This has been my point for years, and it has only gotten worse. Right now I'm thinking of writing an addon that simply blocks all third-party content (not just cookies), removes any divs that have a className or ID containing "share", removes comments after the first 100 (5000 comments and no pagination is not exceptional), etc. Perhaps just ignore output after FirstH1TagOnPage.ParentNode.Endtag.PositionInDataStream. I think my site does alright, sameless plug: https://lucb1e.com/ https://lucb1e.com/. Note that it's hosted on low-end hardware; if you want to view loading times, append ?debug to the URL. Or should I even get rid of the share buttons on articles here? I don't think they're used much anyway.

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ay 14y ago
A small (offtopic) comment on your blog entry about IPv6... /64 is not twice the IPv4 address space - it's twice the number of bits. This translates 2^32 times bigger than entire address space.
- lucb1e 14y ago
  That's what I meant. I'll edit for clarity, thanks :)
Kliment 14y ago
Sounds very similar to readability.
- lucb1e 14y ago
  Only without parsing all pages through a (rather slow) third party service, but yes parsing all outgoing HN links through Readability by default was another idea that never made it.

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brudgers 14y ago

"This" is the internet Google created. Not a catalog of all information, but a catalog of all the information which has been wrapped in monetization schemes. Use Google Search for "convert PDF to HTML." See page after page of links which Google might monetize alongside the paid advertisements it already has. Google makes it look like this is a difficult task, not a solved problem with a FOSS solution - Pdftohtml that ships in many Linux distros. Google obfuscates the most relevant information by burying it within links to discussions on Linux forums. Even though there's a fucking SourceForge page and it links to a Windows friendly version. The crap results increases the odds that the average user will click through a revenue generating link either directly on Google's page or on a site running their ads.

cromwellian 14y ago
Google didn't invent Web advertising and the page linked to doesn't have any AdSense ads. In fact, Google has restrictions against using too many ad networks or filling pages with too many ads, and that will cause your page to get down ranked.
- deleted 14y ago
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polyfractal 14y ago
Search for "convert PDF to HTML linux" and you have a whole page of relevant, useful links. I don't understand your complaint. Google isn't making anything seem "difficult". They offer advertising space, and companies happen to sell pdf conversion software. Therefore, those ads show up on searches. It isn't Google's fault if the companies advertising pitch is "PDF Conversion is hard!". That's the company, not Google. Google hasn't forced the internet to do anything. The reason we have terrible pages like the one in the OP is because of the economics of giving away free content and relying on advertising. I'm not a huge fan of Google, but your complaint is pretty :tinfoil:
mseebach 14y ago
No, Google did not create attention-grabbing-for-money. Look in a good old yellow pages phone book: All those colourful, attention-grabbing ads diverting your attention from the small-print actual listings? They're paid for. Google merely made a very successful business out of making businesses willing to pay up slightly easier to find, roughly like the yellow pages did. Finally, on your "convert PDF to HTML" example: My first hit is PDFOnline.com, that has a nice, green button labeled "upload". When I use that button to upload a PDF document, the site generates a HTML document for me. It was quick, easy and it didn't ask for money. Totally passable for the top result for the query. pdftohtml was the fourth link - hardly outrageous for a terse, technically worded page. Oh and that Windows version (helpfully referred to as a "win32 GUI", because nobody calls it "windows" anyway) that it linked to? The link is dead.

kingmanaz 14y ago

As an AmigaOS 3.1 stalwart unable to view HTML5 content, I’d love to see an Internet partially based upon a TeX-like markup. Rather than “<!DOCTYPE html>”, such a document would use “<!DOCTYPE typeset>”. An alternative browser would parse and present the markup when either the doctype is encountered, or a “.ts” extension is linked to. Typeset content would be displayed using the traditional tricks of typesetting: kerning, proper justification, avoidance of rivers, optimal reading line-length, etc. Here’s a sample of what the web could be: http://i.stack.imgur.com/W9uon.jpg http://i.stack.imgur.com/W9uon.jpg . More often than not, today’s Web is gaudy and garish, as 99% of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript’s functionality is unneeded for everyday reading. For plain reading a Typeset browser and typesetting-friendly markup would an improvement over the status quo, wherein every man reinvents the art of typesetting at his website, and often with tragic results.

ChrisLTD 14y ago
This is why Instapaper and similar services have a market. We should be thankful that enough of the web is parseable for these tools to work and not stuck in something like a Flash file.
- drdaeman 14y ago
  Flash file is parseable too, just harder to parse. (And it still is, even if text is converted to curves.) The real problem is, websites are not much of documents anymore. Their parts are steadily moving up the Chomsky hierarchy, becoming programs.
leephillips 14y ago
Well, a good fraction of serious online content is in the form of PDFs created with LaTeX or a close relative. But it would be really interesting to have a browser that incorporated the TeX engine, and could typeset from TeX source to the current window width. And there is recent progress on javascript implementations of TeX.
nickzoic 14y ago
Or you could just improve the text rendering engine of a normal HTML browser to do better typesetting. That'd make your HTML2.0 content look nice too! It isn't like using TeX is any guarantee of niceness: http://www.ieee.org/documents/TRANS-JOUR.pdf http://www.ieee.org/documents/TRANS-JOUR.pdf

notjustanymike 14y ago

I worked at newsweek and later The Daily Beast as a web developer in charge of analytics, so I can provide some insight into this. The product managers were under constant pressure to increase traffic, so they'd add every new feature that appeared in front of them. Facebook, comments, social crap, stock ticker (that -nearly- happened), it didn't matter. Each one of these did add a marginal amount of measurable traffic. Here's where the analytics part kicks in. The numbers did not reflect that our readers hated all that noise, and the product managers wouldn't dare remove something that generates traffic. So no matter how pointless something was, if it generated traffic it stayed for good.

laumars 14y ago
Did it generate more traffic, or were those extra hits just users tapping "refresh" because of page timeouts when trying to grab the larger sized site on a crappy 3G connection? (joke)
- Kesty 14y ago
  It might be a joke, but is real. Adwise, the reason why you have more impression doesn't really matter.

lifeformed 14y ago

I wish I could pay for my web visits in real money instead of ad views. It'd be nice to get the experience of AdBlock without having to deprive content providers of revenue. It'd also be nice if people could design websites without giving prime visual estate to viewer annoyances. Maybe you could pick what percentage you distribute to your viewed sites, so you can support your favorite content providers. How much would it cost to offset my ad-less experience? It couldn't be that much, could it? Let's say the average website that I visit has 3 ads per page, with an average CPM of $2 per ad. That means every 1,000 times I visit those sites, I would need to pay $6. According to RescueTime, I spent roughly 16 hours a week on websites. If I spend 1 minute per page (a really rough guess), that's 960 views per week. Since I'm using really fuzzy numbers, the ballpark range is looking like $10-50 per month, probably around $20ish. That's doable, but it's pretty steep considering the alternative. I'm sure there are probably ways to reduce the cost that I'm overlooking.

hipsters_unite 14y ago
I've thought this for years. Something like Flattr, except, y'know, that works and people use.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

I've started using "why the internet sucks" as an indicator that the person writing may be more in love with a good rant than anything else. I don't think you can weigh the number of bytes you receive that are the message against the total weight of the page. Doesn't work like that. Facebook gives me a stream of people I know saying useless things. I consume maybe 4-5K of plaintext on it every day. Have any idea how much crap it pushes down the pipe? How much real-estate all the things I don't care about consume? A lot. Hell, the information isn't even that valuable. But still I consume it. It's way more complicated than the author makes out. If I wanted to know Abraham Lincoln's birthday and you put it in bold 48-point text in the center of the page, I'm spending 3 seconds reading it and I'm gone. The rest of the experience is just a waste of time and bytes on the part of the supplier. Who cares? ADD: It's not the crappy ads and social stuff that's the problem. It's sites using more and more techniques to subtly make you stick around. The subtle distractions, like a FB list of which friends also liked reading the particular article, or offering badges for participation, or tracking you across sites, that cause the most long-term trouble for folks. The big, glaring stuff is easy. People are used to that crap by now.

chewxy 14y ago

I've just moved and while my ISP is still setting up my internet, I'm using my phone's 3G for internet. Having a quota on the internet bandwidth, I created a minimal browsing profile: no images, no javascript, no flash. You'd be surprised how many websites are broken. Facebook, twitter, mashable, theverge all consistently consistently consumed hundreds of megabytes per page. When I used my minimal browsing profile, those sites were so much faster. Browsing reddit without being logged in shows how much junk is in reddit (no point clicking on links that go to imgur afterall). I suddenly found myself to be far more productive. In fact I think when I get my ADSL up again, I'm going to keep using the minimal profile

trotsky 14y ago

While stuck with the dreaded neighbor "hey, you're a computer guy" support visit It was a real eyeopener about the ux of crapware laden toolbar filled ie9 win 7 experience. No wonder some people just hate computers. What struck me the most was how she gets her email. FIOS set her up with their webmail, so she clicks on the bookmark, it shows a progress bar for 5 seconds while i assume it's pulling your customer info. Once that clears they showed a full page interstitial about some verizon product and i think lacked any skip button. Once that cleared they showed what amounted to an old school portal - about a third was verizon info/support/ok apps, but then the rest was filled with some crap news feed inserts a few product upsell teasers, and i think a third party ad or two. Ok click on email, normal login page, open email app. So this thing has a Verizon top banner that's huge, like 25% or 30% of her screen that is framed and never scrolls off. It takes two clicks just to make it show her inbox instead of a blank content area. The app wasn't terrible, just maybe circa 2002 or so with only a few of the controls disguising themselves as the background. Usable enough as long as you don't mind the actual mail/composer only getting about 25% of the screen real estate. The kicker was the timeout - "for her protection" it kills her idle session after somewhere around 10-20 minutes at which point it pops up a modal dialog about being logged out, then pops it up again after you hit ok. Then it's back to stage 1 (5 second progress bar) and the experience begins anew including the interstitial and submitting you email credentials again. I know telcos do some of the worst software engineering on earth, but jesus. No wonder some people consider the web as shitty and just want to get whatever task they need to use it for over with. And no, I didn't really do much to improve it aside from exiling the toolbars and some shittier than average bestbuy run at login crap ware. I feel shitty about not making it at least not terrible, but that's hours to set things up right + a few hours of instruction + then the support calls come :/ And then the neighbor she told the story to calls. It sucks that things like geeksquad are so shitty and are prone to upselling crap and exploiting technophobes. And I assume the it pro flier sector is at least as bad on average. Because if you're a novice and don't have a relative that's ok you're basically stuck. And yet I made her swear twice that she won't tell any of her friends that I helped her. [1] Ok, yeah, I guess I got a bit off topic there. But fios portal webmail is shitty.

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Groxx 14y ago

jha: then stop selling ads on this very page Reply by mikecane: I don’t. WordPressdotcom does so I can use it for free. I don’t see any of that money. Oh boy. Where to start...

ctdonath 14y ago
Yup. He responds to the "pot, kettle, black" observations with a whining "it's not my fault! it'd be better if I had my own server!" (someone point him to a cheap server, please).
- nickzoic 14y ago
  * Wordpress.com plus $30/year to remove ads? * wordpress on a AWS microinstance (free for the first year, 'bout $100/yr after that)? * Cheapie shared host like asmallorange.com (better than you'd expect for $35/year) * Static blog tool (pelican etc) pushed into AWS S3 plus disqus for comments?

JacksonGariety 14y ago

The internet doesn't suck. People's lives suck around the internet.

chubbard 14y ago

"Gentlemen start your bitchin!1!!1!!"

njharman 14y ago

> And no, I don’t have a solution. AdBlock, duh!

evolve2k 14y ago

To be honest that awful big google sponsored banner ad that shows on your site ain't much better.