Google Reader was never the answer. It's such a shame that people even here don't realize that relying on Google for that had interests at odds - and you weren't part of the equation at all.
Well, except for your data. You didn't give them enough data. So they shut down shop. Gmail though, ammirite? :D
Yeah I wonder why gmail was not one of the shut down products /s
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.
If people tune out only because how horrible the sites are, good.
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.
Only several days ago I watched the presenter of RobWords whinging about wanting more subscribers and stating that many more people just watch his presentations than watch and also subscribe.
The other problem YouTube has is that unlike Netflix et al with high ranking commercial content are the millions of small presenters who do not use advertising and or just want to tell the world at large their particular srories. Enforced DRM would altogether ruin that ecosystem.
Another quick point: my observation is that the worse the ad problem the lower quality the content is. Cory Doctorow's "enshitification" encapsulates the problems in a nutshell.
No.
"savvy" web surfers are a rounding error in global audience terms. Vast majorities of web users, whether paying subscribers to a site like NYT or not, have no idea what a megabyte is, nor what javascript is, nor why they might want to care about either. The only consideration is whether the site has content they want to consume and whether or not it loads. It's true that a double digit % are using ad blockers, but they aren't doing this out of deep concerns about Javascript complexity.
Do what you have to do, but no one at the NYT is losing any sleep over people like us.
They know this. They also know that web surfers like you would never actually buy a subscription and you have an ad blocker running to deny any revenue generation opportunities.
> Do I feel guilty about skimming off info in this manner? No, not the slightest bit.
Why would you feel guilty for not visiting a site you’re not paying for and where you’re blocking ads? Your visit would provide nothing of value to them.
[0]: https://svelte.dev/
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.
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.
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!?
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.
[1] https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/
You're not insightful for noticing a website is dog slow or that there is a ton of data being served (almost none of which is actually the code). Please stop blaming the devs. You're laundering blame. Almost no detail of a web site or app is ever up to the devs alone.
From the perspective of the devs, they expect that the infrastructure can handle what the business wanted. If you have a problem you really should punch up, not down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
Have a wonderful day =3
The responsibility of the devs is to deliver what was asked. They can and probably do make notes of the results. So does QA. So do the other stakeholders. On their respective teams they get the same BS from everyone who isn't pleased with the outcome.
Ultimately things are on a deadline and the devs must meet requirements where the priority is not performance. It says nothing about their ability to write performant code. It says nothing about whether that performant code is even possible in a browser while meeting the approval of the dozens of people with their own agendas. It says everything about where you work.
If a bridge engineer is asked to build a bridge that would collapse under its own weight, they will refuse. Why should it be different for software engineers?
You're not even arguing with me BTW. You're arguing against the entire premise of running a business. Priorities are not going to necessarily be what you value most.
There are good reasons to have a small cheap development staging server, as the rate-limited connection implicitly trains people what not to include. =3
It’s as if everyone designed their website around the KPI of irritating your visitors and getting them to leave ASAP.
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.
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.
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
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.
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I mean, they can absolutely try. That doesn't mean they should succeed.