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?
I hope he is being ironic. After all, it says THIS page is why the internet sucks. Otherwise, the sense of entitlement is ridiculous. He has a free, hosted blog because it is ad-supported. He must be taking the mickey
WordPress.com has a lot of really bad themes. With my own blog (hosted on the same network), I gave up looking and went with a simple responsive theme with decent typography.
"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.
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.
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:
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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/. 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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] Drakim|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noir_lord|13 years ago|reply
Frequent post's to logger.base79.com who (once I figured out how to navigate their site) appear to be some shady rights management company.
The post request also contains the following
{"uuidSession":"xxxx","uuidPermanent":"xxx","ip":"83.xxx.xxx.234","partner":"dailymash","timeStamp":"Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:17:20 GMT","youtube":{"title":"Favourite One Liner","video_id":"toEqW3wGQSs","volume":0,"duration":141,"currentTime":5,"currentPercent":4}}
Delightful.
[+] [-] ashleyblackmore|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjwebb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkr-hn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mseebach|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] polyfractal|13 years ago|reply
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:
[+] [-] cromwellian|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pointyhatuk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingmanaz|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leephillips|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickzoic|13 years ago|reply
It isn't like using TeX is any guarantee of niceness: http://www.ieee.org/documents/TRANS-JOUR.pdf
[+] [-] zimpenfish|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpswade|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
Edit: (I'm kidding, not being mean)
[+] [-] notjustanymike|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] trotsky|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shawabawa3|13 years ago|reply
edit: No relevant results for
edit2: oops, apparently the daily mash is satireby the way, jasoncartwright, your reply is "dead"
[+] [-] danielsamuels|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasoncartwright|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] danso|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|13 years ago|reply
Edit: adjusted sizes to correct for errors due to caching.
[+] [-] claudius|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richorama|13 years ago|reply
Pot calling kettle?
[+] [-] chewxy|13 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] dreen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drdaeman|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lifeformed|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkozyra|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lucb1e|13 years ago|reply
I think my site does alright, sameless plug: 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.
[+] [-] ay|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Kliment|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lyndonh|13 years ago|reply
Or "This Page..." is actually a self reference ?
[+] [-] rejschaap|13 years ago|reply
I'd recommend getting inspiration from other blogs, https://svbtle.com/ for instance.
[+] [-] ronilan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shawabawa3|13 years ago|reply
That gives him a ratio of ~1/1000 as opposed to the article he's complaining about's ~1/4000