Our developers managed to run around 750MB per website open once.
They have put in ticket with ops that the server is slow and could we look at it. So we looked. Every single video on a page with long video list pre-loaded a part of it. The single reason the site didn't ran like shit for them is coz office had direct fiber to out datacenter few blocks away.
We really shouldn't allow web developers more than 128kbit of connection speed, anything more and they just make nonsense out of it.
PSA for those who aren’t aware: Chromium/Firefox-based browsers have a Network tab in the developer tools where you can dial down your bandwidth to simulate a slower 3G or 4G connection.
Combined with CPU throttling, it's a decent sanity check to see how well your site will perform on more modest setups.
I once spent around an hour optimizing a feature because it felt slow - turns out that the slower simulated connection had just stayed enabled after a restart (can’t remember if it was just the browser or the OS, but I previously needed it and then later just forgot to turn it off). Good times, useful feature though!
I still test mine on GPRS, because my website should work fine in the Berlin U-Bahn. I also spent a lot of time working from hotels and busses with bad internet, so I care about that stuff.
Developers really ought to test such things better.
CPU/network throttling needs to be set for the product manager and management - that's the only way you might see real change.
We have some egregious slowness in our app that only shows up for our largest customers in production but none of our organizations in development have that much data. I created a load testing organization and keep considering adding management to it so they implicitly get the idea that fixing the slowness is important.
For macOS users you can download the Network Link Conditioner preference pane (it still works in the System Settings app) to do this system wide. I think it's in the "Additional Tools for Xcode" download.
I had a fairly large supplier that was so proud that they implemented a functionality that deliberately (in their JS) slows down reactions from http responses. So that they can showcase all the UI touches like progress bars and spinning circles. It was an option in system settings you could turn on globally.
My mind was blown, are they not aware of F12 in any major browser? They were not, it seems. After I quietly asked about that, they removed the whole thing equally quietly and never spoke of it again. It's still in release notes, though.
It was like 2 years ago, so browsers could do that for 10-14 years (depending how you count).
For Firefox users, here's where it's hidden (and it really is hidden): Hamburger menu -> More tools -> Web developer tools, then keep clicking on the ">>" until the Network tab appears, then scroll over on about the third menu bar down until you see "No throttling", that's a combobox that lets you set the speed you want.
Alternatively, run uBlock Origin and NoScript and you probably won't need it.
Peanuts! My wife’s workplace has an internal photo gallery page. If your device can cope with it and you wait long enough, it’ll load about 14GB of images (so far). In practice, it will crawl along badly and eventually just crash your browser (or more), especially if you’re on a phone.
The single-line change of adding loading=lazy to the <img> elements wouldn’t fix everything, but it would make the page at least basically usable.
Reserve a huge share of the blame for the “UX dEsIgNeRs”. Let’s demand to reimplement every single standard widget in a way that has 50% odds of being accessible, has bugs, doesn’t work correctly with autofill most of the time, and adds 600kB of code per widget. Our precious branding requires it.
often we're told to add Google XSS-as-a-serv.. I mean Tag Manager, then the non-tech people in Marketing go ham without a care in the world beyond their metrics. Can't blame them, it's what they're measured on.
Marketing and managers should be restricted as well, because managers set the priorities.
You can still make a site unusable without having it load lots of data. Go to https://bunnings.com.au on a phone and try looking up an item. It's actually faster to walk around the store and find an employee and get them to look it up on an in-store terminal than it is to use their web site to find something. A quick visit to profiles.firefox.com indicates it's probably more memory than CPU, half a gigabyte of memory consumed if I'm interpreting the graphical bling correctly.
You don't even need video for this: I once worked for a company that put a carousel with everything in the product line, and every element was just pointing to the high resolution photography assets: The one that maybe would be useful for full page print media ads. 6000x4000 pngs. It worked fine in the office, they said. Add another nice background that size, a few more to have on the sides as you scroll down...
I was asked to look at the site when it was already live, and some VP of the parent company decided to visit the site from their phone at home.
Many web application frameworks already have extensive built-in optimization features, though examples like the one that you shared indicate that there are fundamentals that many people contributing to the modern web simply don't grasp or understand that these frameworks won't just 'catch you out' on in many cases. It speaks to an overreliance on the tools and a critical lack of understanding of the technologies that they co-exist with.
Music producers often have some shitty speakers known as grot boxes that they use to make sure their mix will sound as good as it can on consumer audio, not just on their extremely expensive studio monitors. Chromebooks are perfectly analogous. As a side note, today I learned that Grotbox is now an actual brand: https://grotbox.com
Should also give designers periodically small displays with low maximum contrast, and have them actually try to achieve everyday tasks with the UX they have designed.
If you want to see context aware pre-fetching done right go to mcmaster.com ...
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
Well as long as the website was already full loaded and responsive, and the videos show a thumbnail/placeholder, you are not blocked by that. Preloading and even very agressive pre-loading are a thing nowaadays. It is hostile to the user (because it draws their network traffic they pay for) but project managers will often override that to maximize gains from ad revenue.
this is a general problem with lots of development. Network, Memory, GPU Speed. Designer / Engineer is on a modern Mac with 16-64 gig of ram and fast internet. They never try how their code/design works on some low end Intel UHD 630 or whatever. Lots of developers making 8-13 layer blob backgrounds that runs at 60 for 120fps on their modern mac but at 5-10fps on the average person's PC because of 15x overdraw.
I used the text web (https://text.npr.org and the like) thru Lyx. Also, Usenet, Gopher, Gemini, some 16 KBPS opus streams, everything under 2.7 KBPS when my phone data plan was throttled and I was using it in tethering mode. Tons of sites did work, but Gopher://magical.fish ran really fast.
Bitlbee saved (and still saves) my ass with tons of the protocols available via IRC using nearly nil data to connect. Also you can connect with any IRC client since early 90's.
Not just web developers. Electron lovers should be trottled with 2GB of RAM machines and some older Celeron/Core Duo machine with a GL 2.1 compatible video card. It it desktop 'app' smooth on that machine, your project it's ready.
I'm pretty damn sure those videos were put on the page because someone in marketing wanted them. I'm pretty sure then QA complained the videos loaded too slowly, so the preloading was added. Then, the upper management responsible for the mess shrugged their shoulders and let it ship.
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.
> 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.
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?
this isn't purely laundering blame. it is frustrating for the infrastructure/operations side is that the dev teams routinely kick the can down to them instead of documenting the performance/reliability weak points. in this case, when someone complains about the performance of the site, both dev and qa should have documented artifacts that explain this potential. as an infrastructure and reliability person, i am happy to support this effort with my own analysis. i am less inclined to support the dev team that just says, "hey, i delivered what they asked for, it's up to you to make it functional."
> 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.
this belittles the intelligence of the dev team. they should know better. it's like validating saying "i really thought i could pour vodka in the fuel tank of this porsche and everything would function correctly. must be porsche's fault."
And the devs are responsible for finding a good technical solution under these constraints. If they can't, for communicating their constraints to the rest of the team so a better tradeoff can be found.
Fuck that. I just left a job where the IT dept just said "yes and" to the executives for 30 years. It was the most fucked environment I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot coming from the MSP space. Professionals get hired to do these things so they can say "No, that's a terrible idea" when people with no knowledge of the domain make requests. Your attitude is super toxic.
The devs are the subject matter experts. Does marketing understand the consequences of preloading all those videos? Does upper management? Unlikely. It’s the experts’ job to educate them. That’s part of the job as much as writing code is.
From the perspective of the devs, they have a responsibility for saying something literally wont fly anywhere, ever, saying the business is responsible for every bad decision is a complete abrogation of your responsibilities.
Just FYI how this generally works: it's not developers who add it, but non-technical people.
Developers only add a single `<script>` in the page, which loads Google Tag Manager, or similar monstrosity, at the request of someone high up in the company. Initially it loads ~nothing, so it's fine.
Over time, non-technical people slap as many advertising "partner" scripts they can in the config of GTM, straight to prod without telling developers, and without thinking twice about impact on loading times etc. All they track is $ earned on ads.
(It's sneaky because those scripts load async in background so it doesn't immediately feel like the website gets slower / more bloated. And of course, on a high end laptop the website feels "fine" compared to a cheap Android. Also, there's nothing developers can do about those requests, they're under full the control of all those 3rd-parties.)
Fun fact: "performance" in the parlance of adtech people means "ad campaign performance", not "website loading speed". ("What do you mean, performance decreased when we added more tracking?")
I tried to fight against the introduction of GTM in a project I worked on; we spent a lot of effort on coding, reviewing, testing, optimizing and minimizing client-side code before our end-users would see it, and the analytics people want a shortcut to inject any JS anywhere?
I didn't win that one, but I did make sure that it would only load after the user agreed to tracking cookies and the like.
Yeah, it’s really hard to compete with a solution that takes engineers out of the loop. The biggest reason large orgs go so crazy with GTM is that it’s a shadow deployment pipeline that doesn’t require waiting for engineers to work a request, or QA, or a standard release process.
And sure, better prioritization and cooperation with eng can make the “real” release processes work better for non-eng stakeholders, but “better” is never going to reach the level of “full autonomy to paste code to deploy via tag manager”.
This is the same reason why many big apps have a ton of Wordpress-managed pages thougout the product (not just marketing pages); often, that’s because the ownership and release process for the WP components is “edit a web UI” rather than “use git and run tests and have a test plan and schedule a PR into a release”.
Similar story here. I had to remind them multiple times, that the website was not conforming with the law, and explain multiple times, that the consent dialog was not implemented correctly, or point out, that stuff was loaded before consenting, etc. They mostly found it annoying, of course. And of course no one thanked me for saving the business from running into any complications with the law. As far as I know, I was the only one there pointing out the issues, as a backend dev, and even the frontend team was blissfully ignorant of the issues.
The good thing about the heavy use of GTM, is that its easy to block. Just block that one endpoint and you remove most of the advertising and tracking. When some new advertising service is invented, its already blocked thanks to the blocking of GTM.
Developers do that as well. Especially now with llm-assisted coding. Accept half-baked solution and go to the next ticket.
I've had recently a case at work, while filling a contact form to add a new party there were 300+ calls to the validation service to validate email and phones. Three calls per every character entered to every text input!
Yeah, never allow non-technical people to put something like google tags manager on the business' website, that can load arbitrary other stuff. The moment this is pushed through, against engineering's advice, distancing yourself from the cesspool, that the website will inevitably become sooner or later, is the healthy choice. It is difficult to uphold the dam, against wishes of other departments, like marketing and sales, and it takes an informed and ethically aware engineering department lead, who upholds principles and remains steadfast. Rare.
GDPR-compliance is the first thing that goes out of the window, and with that conforming to the law, when in the EU. Ethics fly out of the window at the same time, or just slightly afterwards, when they add tracking, that no one agreed to, or when they forget to ask for consent, or when they have a "consent" popup, that employs dark pattern, or when they outsource consent to a third party tool, that informed visitors don't want anything to do with.
Author here. Woke up in today to see this on the front page, thank you to the person who submitted it! Initially, my biggest fear was the HN "Hug of Death" taking it down. Happily, Cloudflare's edge caching absorbed 19.24 GB of bandwidth in a few hours with a 98.5% cache hit ratio, so the origin server barely noticed.
The discussions here about DNS-level blocking and Pi-hole are spot on. It's interesting that the burden of a clean reading experience is slowly being offloaded to the user's network stack.
Sure thing! I don't have the exact instantaneous peak since Cloudflare groups historical data by the hour on the free tier, but the peak 60 minutes last night saw 70,100 requests. That averages out to about 20 requests per second sustained over the hour. Wish I could be more granular but hope that helps a little.
I have done minor experiments with disabling javascript, it works most publications are far more readable with javascript disabled, you miss carousels and some interactive elements but overall a much better experience.
These days the NYT is in a race to the bottom. I no longer even bother to bypass ads let alone read the news stories because of its page bloat and other annoyances. It's just not worth the effort.
Surely news outlets like the NYT must realize that savvy web surfers like yours truly when encountering "difficult" news sites—those behind firewalls and or with megabytes of JavaScript bloat—will just go elsewhere or load pages without JavaScript.
We'll simply cut the headlines from the offending website and past it into a search engine and find another site with the same or similar info but with easier access.
I no longer think about it as by now my actions are automatic. Rarely do I find an important story that's just limited to only one website, generally dozens have the story and because of syndication the alternative site one selects even has identical text and images.
My default browsing is with JavaScript defaulted to "off" and it's rare that I have to enable it (which I can do with just one click).
I never see Ads on my Android phone or PC and that includes YouTube. Disabling JavaScript on webpages nukes just about all ads, they just vanish, any that escape through are then trapped by other means. In ahort, ads are optional. (YouTube doesn't work sans JS, so just use NewPipe or PipePipe to bypass ads.)
Disabling JavaScript also makes pages blindingly fast as all that unnecessary crap isn't loaded. Also, sans JS it's much harder for websites to violate one's privacy and sell one's data.
Do I feel guilty about skimming off info in this manner? No, not the slightest bit. If these sites played fair then it'd be a different matter but they don't. As they act like sleazebags they deserve to be treated as such.
In the past some site had light versions, but I haven’t come across one in over 10 years
Makes me wonder if this isn’t just some rogue employee maintaining this without anyone else realizing it
It’s the light version, but ironically I would happily pay these ad networks a monthly $20 to just serve these lite pages and not track me. They don’t make anywhere close to that from me in a year
Sadly, here’s how it would go: they’d do it, it be successful, they’d ipo, after a few years they’d need growth, they’d introduce a new tier with ads, and eventually you’d somehow wind up watching ads again
> 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.
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.
Visitors like you are a tiny minority who were never going to contribute revenue anyway. You’re doing them a very tiny favor by staying away instead of incrementally increasing their hosting bills.
>Visitors like you are a tiny minority who were never going to contribute revenue anyway.
It's closer to 30% that block ads. For subscription conversion, it's under 1%.
It's a large reason why the situation is so bad. But the internet is full of children, even grown children now in their 40's, who desperately still cling to this teenage idea that ad blocking will save the internet.
That's why we need to spread the word and get more people using adblockers. It's not even a hard sell - the difference is so striking, once it has been seen, it sells itself, even for the most casual users.
"Why would you feel guilty for not visiting a site you’re not paying for and where you’re blocking ads?"
This isn't a simple as it sounds, in fact it's rather complicated (far too involved to cover in depth here).
In short, ethics are involved (and believe it or not I actually possess some)!
In the hayday of newsprint people actually bought newspapers at a cheap affordable price and the bulk of their production was paid for by advertisements. We readers mostly paid for what we read, newspapers were profitable and much journalism was of fair to good quality. Back then, I had no qualms about forking out a few cents for a copy of the NYT.
Come the internet the paradigm changed and we all know what happened next. In fact, I feel sorry about the demise of newsprint because what's replaced it is of significantly lesser value.
In principle I've no objection to paying for news but I will not do so for junk and ads that I cannot avoid (with magazines and newspapers ads are far less intrusive).
So what's the solution? It's difficult but I reckon there are a few worth considering. For example, I mentioned some while ago on HN that making micro payments to websites ought to be MUCH easier than it is now (this would apply to all websites and would also be a huge boon for open source developers).
What I had in mind was an anonymous "credit" card system with no strings attached. Go to your local supermarket, kiosk or whatever and purchase a scratchy card with a unique number to say the value of $50 for cash and use that card to make very small payments to websites. Just enter the card's number and the transaction is done (only enter one's details if purchasing something that has to be delivered).
That way both the card and user remain anonymous if the user wishes, also one's privacy is preserved, etc. It could be implemented by blockchain or such.
The technical issues are simple but
problems are obvious—and they're all political. Governments would go berserk and cry money laundering, tax evasion, criminal activity, etc., and the middlemen such as Master and Visa cards would scream to high heaven that their monopolies were being undercut.
In short, my proposal is essentially parallels what now exits with cash—I go to a supermarket and pay cash for groceries, the store doesn't need to know who I am. It ought to be no big deal but it isn't.
It seems to me a very simple micro payments system without name, rank and serial number attached would solve many of the internet payment problems.
Sure, there'll always be hardline scavengers and scrapers but many people would be only too happy to pay a little amount for a service they wanted, especially so when they knew the money was going into producing better products.
For example, I'd dearly love to be able to say purchase a copy of LibreOffice for $10 - $20 and know there was enough money in the organisation to develop the product to be fully on par with MSO.
Trouble is when buying stuff on the internet there's a minimum barrier to overcome and it's too high for most people when it comes to making micro payments (especially when the numbers could run into the hundreds per week).
I cannot understand why those who'd benefit from such a scheme haven't at least attempted to push the matter.
Something about these JS-heavy sites I haven't seen discussed: They don't archive well.
Websites that load a big JS bundle, then use that to fetch the actual page content don't get archived properly by The Wayback Machine. That might not be a problem for corporate content, but lots of interesting content has already been lost to time because of this.
> 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.
Seems like a gross overestimation of how much facility people have with computers but they don't want random article readers anyway; they want subscribers who use the app or whatever.
> 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.
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.
"…but no one at the NYT is losing any sleep over people like us."
Likely not, but they are over their lost revenues. The profitability of newspapers and magazines has been slashed to ribbons over the past couple of decades and internet revenues hardly nudge the graphs.
Internet beneficiaries are all new players, Google et al.
> 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.
Where do you trust to read the news? Any newsrooms well staffed enough to verify stories (and not just reprint hearsay) seem to have the same issues.
The AP and Reuters are well-staffed and have functional websites. The sites aren’t great (they’ve been afflicted with bloat and advertising along with most outlets, just at a marginally lower rate), but they are at least usable.
I don't understand all these sites with moving parts even with muted soon, like if everything was a collection of GIFs. NYT followed this path and started to insert muted clips preheminently on their page one, very very annoying.
Do you think youtube will continue to make it possible to use alternate clients, or eventually go the way of e.g. Netflix with DRM so you're forced to use their client and watch ads?
They are also not averse to using legal means to block them. For example, back when Microsoft shipped Windows Phone, Google refused to make an official YouTube client for it, so Microsoft hacked together its own. Google forced them to remove it from the store: https://www.windowscentral.com/google-microsoft-remove-youtu...
If Google were just starting YouTube today then DRM would likely be enforced through a dedicated app. The trouble for Google is that millions watch YouTube through web browsers many of whom aren't even using a Google account let alone even being subscribers to a particular YouTube page. Viewership would drop dramatically.
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 stories. Enforced DRM would altogether ruin that ecosystem.
Big tech will slowly enforce "secure browsing" and "secure OS" in a way that will make it impossible to browse the web without a signed executable approved by them. DRM is just a temporary stopgap.
What does playing fair mean in this context? It would be one thing if you were a paid subscriber complaining that even paying sucks so you left, but it sounds like you’re not.
It is strange to hear these threats about avoiding websites from people who are not subscribers and also definitely using an ad blocker.
News sites aren’t publishing their content for the warm fuzzy feeling of seeing their visitor count go up. They’re running businesses. If you’re dead set on not paying and not seeing ads, it’s actually better for them that you don’t visit the site at all.
I am a paid subscriber to NYT and have been reading it paper / internet for 30+ years. It is an Enshittification winner in terms tracking and click bait. It doesn't feel like a serious news outlet anymore, feels like Huff Post or similar.
I'd like to answer that in detail but it's impractical to do so here as it'd take pages. As a starter though begin with them not violating users' privacy.
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.
You're right, it means nothing. But it cuts two ways. These sites are sending me bytes and I choose which bytes I visualize (via an ad blocker). Any expectation the website has about how I consume the content has no meaning and it's entirely their problem.
The NYT is comically bad. Most of their (paywalled) articles include the full text in a JSON blob, and that text is typically 2-4% of the HTML. Most of the other 96-98% is ads and tracking. If you allow those to do their thing, you're looking at probably two orders of magnitude more overhead.
My family's first broadband internet connection, circa 2005, came with a monthly data quota of 400 MB.
The fundamental problem of journalism is that the economics no longer works out. Historically, the price of a copy of a newspaper barely covered the cost of printing; the rest of the cost was covered by advertising. And there was an awful lot of advertising: everything was advertised in newspapers. Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist were a section of the newspaper, as was whichever website you check for used cars or real estate listings. Journalism had to be subsidised by advertising, because most people aren't actually that interested in the news to pay the full cost of quality reporting; nowadays, the only newspapers that are thriving are those that aggressively target those who have an immediate financial interest in knowing what's going on: the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and so on.
The fact is that for most people, the news was interesting because it was new every day. Now that there is a more compelling flood of entertainment in television and the internet, news reporting is becoming a niche product.
The lengths that news websites are going to to extract data from their readers to sell to data brokers is just a last-ditch attempt to remain profitable.
I remember getting punishment from parents for downloading 120MB World of Tanks update over metered home internet. Our monthly quota was 250MB. It was not that long ago, 2010.
In the late '90s, a friend recommended I download some freeware from a website. It was 1.2MB. I told him "are you crazy? 1.2MB? It's gonna take a whole week!"
> The fundamental problem of journalism is that the economics no longer works out.
Yes it does, from nytimes actual earning release for Q 2025:
1. The Company added approximately 450,000 net digital-only subscribers compared with the end of the third quarter of 2025, bringing the total number of subscribers to 12.78 million.
2. Total digital-only average revenue per user (“ARPU”) increased 0.7 percent year-over-year to $9.72
2025 subscription revenue was 1.950 billion dollars. Advertising was 565 million that includes 155 million dollars worth of print advertising.
Sure operating profit is only 550 million very close to the advertising revenue, but the bulk of their income is subscriptions, they could make it work if they had to. My suspicion is that if they dropped all the google ads they could have better subscription retention and conversion rates as well.
A lot of free government phone plans supplied to homeless, parolees etc in the USA only come with 3GB of transfer credit, which is usually burned up in about 3 days, leaving them without any Internet access. (or sometimes it'll drop to a throttled connection that is so slow that it can never even load Google Maps)
I just loaded the nytimes.com page as an experiment. The volume of tracking pixels and other ad non-sense is truly horrifying.
But at least in terms of the headline metric of bandwidth, it's somewhat less horrifying. With my ad-blocker off, Firefox showed 44.47mb transferred. Of that 36.30mb was mp4 videos. These videos were journalistic in nature (they were not ads).
So, yes in general, this is like the Hindenburg of web pages. But I still think it's worth noting that 80% of that headline bandwidth is videos, which is just part of the site's content. One could argue that it is too video heavy, but that's an editorial issue, not an engineering issue.
Why are we supposed to think it's normal to see videos on every page? Even where it's directly relevant to the current page, what's the justification in thrusting those 36.30mb on the user before they explicitly click play?
It’s a news site with a lot of auto-playing video. If you like that kind of content, great. If not, there’s lots of other websites with different mixes of content. I subscribe to the economist which has few videos and they never auto play.
But that’s a question of taste. 5mb of JavaScript and hundreds of tracking assets is not.
I also use and like the comparison in units of Windows 95 installs (~40MB), which is also rather ironic in that Win95 was widely considered bloated when it was released.
While this article focuses on ads, it's worth noting that sites have had ads for a long time, but it's their obnoxiousness and resource usage that's increased wildly over time. I wouldn't mind small sponsored links and (non-animated!) banners, but the moment I enable JS to read an article and it results in a flurry of shit flying all over the page and trying to get my attention, I leave promptly.
I would love for someone more knowledgeable in this space than I to chime in on the economics of this industry
Are the few cents you get from antagonizing users really worth it?
I suspect the answer is simple and that most users don’t give a shit
I think it has to do a lot with when you came of age - I’m in my late 30s, I got my first tech job at 14 as a sys admin for a large school district, and every single developer, admin, etc that I knew was already going on about the free internet. As a result, I’ve never had a tolerance for anything but the most reasonable advertisements
I think that ideology is necessary to care enough and be motivated enough to really get rid of ads, how fucking awful the websites are alone should be enough but for most people it isn’t
Not only are loading times and total network usage ridiculous, sites will continue to violate your privacy via trackers and waste your CPU even when background idling. I've written about these issues a few times in the last few years, so just sharing for those interested:
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.
Combined with CPU throttling, it's a decent sanity check to see how well your site will perform on more modest setups.
Developers really ought to test such things better.
We have some egregious slowness in our app that only shows up for our largest customers in production but none of our organizations in development have that much data. I created a load testing organization and keep considering adding management to it so they implicitly get the idea that fixing the slowness is important.
I had a fairly large supplier that was so proud that they implemented a functionality that deliberately (in their JS) slows down reactions from http responses. So that they can showcase all the UI touches like progress bars and spinning circles. It was an option in system settings you could turn on globally.
My mind was blown, are they not aware of F12 in any major browser? They were not, it seems. After I quietly asked about that, they removed the whole thing equally quietly and never spoke of it again. It's still in release notes, though.
It was like 2 years ago, so browsers could do that for 10-14 years (depending how you count).
Alternatively, run uBlock Origin and NoScript and you probably won't need it.
The single-line change of adding loading=lazy to the <img> elements wouldn’t fix everything, but it would make the page at least basically usable.
"Why do you want 64 GB RAM in your laptop?"
"I need that to load the gallery"
Marketing dept. too. They're the primary culprits in all the tracking scripts.
Marketing and managers should be restricted as well, because managers set the priorities.
I was asked to look at the site when it was already live, and some VP of the parent company decided to visit the site from their phone at home.
[1] https://css-tricks.com/test-your-product-on-a-crappy-laptop/
I wouldn't even guarantee it's developers adding it. I'm sure they have some sort of content management system for doing article and ad layout.
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
I'm so happy to have seen their web site that I want to do business with them, even though I have no business to be done.
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Bitlbee saved (and still saves) my ass with tons of the protocols available via IRC using nearly nil data to connect. Also you can connect with any IRC client since early 90's.
Not just web developers. Electron lovers should be trottled with 2GB of RAM machines and some older Celeron/Core Duo machine with a GL 2.1 compatible video card. It it desktop 'app' smooth on that machine, your project it's ready.
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.
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?
> 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.
this belittles the intelligence of the dev team. they should know better. it's like validating saying "i really thought i could pour vodka in the fuel tank of this porsche and everything would function correctly. must be porsche's fault."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
Have a wonderful day =3
Just FYI how this generally works: it's not developers who add it, but non-technical people.
Developers only add a single `<script>` in the page, which loads Google Tag Manager, or similar monstrosity, at the request of someone high up in the company. Initially it loads ~nothing, so it's fine.
Over time, non-technical people slap as many advertising "partner" scripts they can in the config of GTM, straight to prod without telling developers, and without thinking twice about impact on loading times etc. All they track is $ earned on ads.
(It's sneaky because those scripts load async in background so it doesn't immediately feel like the website gets slower / more bloated. And of course, on a high end laptop the website feels "fine" compared to a cheap Android. Also, there's nothing developers can do about those requests, they're under full the control of all those 3rd-parties.)
Fun fact: "performance" in the parlance of adtech people means "ad campaign performance", not "website loading speed". ("What do you mean, performance decreased when we added more tracking?")
I didn't win that one, but I did make sure that it would only load after the user agreed to tracking cookies and the like.
And sure, better prioritization and cooperation with eng can make the “real” release processes work better for non-eng stakeholders, but “better” is never going to reach the level of “full autonomy to paste code to deploy via tag manager”.
This is the same reason why many big apps have a ton of Wordpress-managed pages thougout the product (not just marketing pages); often, that’s because the ownership and release process for the WP components is “edit a web UI” rather than “use git and run tests and have a test plan and schedule a PR into a release”.
I've had recently a case at work, while filling a contact form to add a new party there were 300+ calls to the validation service to validate email and phones. Three calls per every character entered to every text input!
GDPR-compliance is the first thing that goes out of the window, and with that conforming to the law, when in the EU. Ethics fly out of the window at the same time, or just slightly afterwards, when they add tracking, that no one agreed to, or when they forget to ask for consent, or when they have a "consent" popup, that employs dark pattern, or when they outsource consent to a third party tool, that informed visitors don't want anything to do with.
The discussions here about DNS-level blocking and Pi-hole are spot on. It's interesting that the burden of a clean reading experience is slowly being offloaded to the user's network stack.
No worries if not :)
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/surviving-the-hug-of-death
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.
If Al Jazeera or BBC had a similar text only site, that would be best. I really love the different perspectives.
I mostly use brutalist.report to find the articles, then deal with them on a case by case basis.
They also compress the hell out of the images, so it all loads shockingly well on poor connections.
In the past some site had light versions, but I haven’t come across one in over 10 years
Makes me wonder if this isn’t just some rogue employee maintaining this without anyone else realizing it
It’s the light version, but ironically I would happily pay these ad networks a monthly $20 to just serve these lite pages and not track me. They don’t make anywhere close to that from me in a year
Sadly, here’s how it would go: they’d do it, it be successful, they’d ipo, after a few years they’d need growth, they’d introduce a new tier with ads, and eventually you’d somehow wind up watching ads again
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.
Visitors like you are a tiny minority who were never going to contribute revenue anyway. You’re doing them a very tiny favor by staying away instead of incrementally increasing their hosting bills.
I subscribe, and yet they still bombard me with ads. Fuck that. One reason I don’t use apps is that I can’t block ads.
It's closer to 30% that block ads. For subscription conversion, it's under 1%.
It's a large reason why the situation is so bad. But the internet is full of children, even grown children now in their 40's, who desperately still cling to this teenage idea that ad blocking will save the internet.
That's not true I had a subscription for multiple years. I canceled it because they
A. Kept trying to show me bullshit ads, B. The overall deterioration of the quality of the content especially the opinion section.
For a while it looked like companies were going to offer a good product at a fair price. I started getting a few subscriptions to various services.
Then all of those services got enshitefied. I got ads in paid accounts, slow loads, obvious data mining, etc.
Paying for services now often offers a degraded experience relative to less legitimate methods of acces.
This isn't a simple as it sounds, in fact it's rather complicated (far too involved to cover in depth here).
In short, ethics are involved (and believe it or not I actually possess some)!
In the hayday of newsprint people actually bought newspapers at a cheap affordable price and the bulk of their production was paid for by advertisements. We readers mostly paid for what we read, newspapers were profitable and much journalism was of fair to good quality. Back then, I had no qualms about forking out a few cents for a copy of the NYT.
Come the internet the paradigm changed and we all know what happened next. In fact, I feel sorry about the demise of newsprint because what's replaced it is of significantly lesser value.
In principle I've no objection to paying for news but I will not do so for junk and ads that I cannot avoid (with magazines and newspapers ads are far less intrusive).
So what's the solution? It's difficult but I reckon there are a few worth considering. For example, I mentioned some while ago on HN that making micro payments to websites ought to be MUCH easier than it is now (this would apply to all websites and would also be a huge boon for open source developers).
What I had in mind was an anonymous "credit" card system with no strings attached. Go to your local supermarket, kiosk or whatever and purchase a scratchy card with a unique number to say the value of $50 for cash and use that card to make very small payments to websites. Just enter the card's number and the transaction is done (only enter one's details if purchasing something that has to be delivered).
That way both the card and user remain anonymous if the user wishes, also one's privacy is preserved, etc. It could be implemented by blockchain or such.
The technical issues are simple but problems are obvious—and they're all political. Governments would go berserk and cry money laundering, tax evasion, criminal activity, etc., and the middlemen such as Master and Visa cards would scream to high heaven that their monopolies were being undercut.
In short, my proposal is essentially parallels what now exits with cash—I go to a supermarket and pay cash for groceries, the store doesn't need to know who I am. It ought to be no big deal but it isn't.
It seems to me a very simple micro payments system without name, rank and serial number attached would solve many of the internet payment problems.
Sure, there'll always be hardline scavengers and scrapers but many people would be only too happy to pay a little amount for a service they wanted, especially so when they knew the money was going into producing better products.
For example, I'd dearly love to be able to say purchase a copy of LibreOffice for $10 - $20 and know there was enough money in the organisation to develop the product to be fully on par with MSO.
Trouble is when buying stuff on the internet there's a minimum barrier to overcome and it's too high for most people when it comes to making micro payments (especially when the numbers could run into the hundreds per week).
I cannot understand why those who'd benefit from such a scheme haven't at least attempted to push the matter.
Oh, and that's just one aspect of the problem.
Websites that load a big JS bundle, then use that to fetch the actual page content don't get archived properly by The Wayback Machine. That might not be a problem for corporate content, but lots of interesting content has already been lost to time because of this.
Seems like a gross overestimation of how much facility people have with computers but they don't want random article readers anyway; they want subscribers who use the app or whatever.
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.
Likely not, but they are over their lost revenues. The profitability of newspapers and magazines has been slashed to ribbons over the past couple of decades and internet revenues hardly nudge the graphs.
Internet beneficiaries are all new players, Google et al.
Where do you trust to read the news? Any newsrooms well staffed enough to verify stories (and not just reprint hearsay) seem to have the same issues.
They are also not averse to using legal means to block them. For example, back when Microsoft shipped Windows Phone, Google refused to make an official YouTube client for it, so Microsoft hacked together its own. Google forced them to remove it from the store: https://www.windowscentral.com/google-microsoft-remove-youtu...
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 stories. Enforced DRM would altogether ruin that ecosystem.
News sites aren’t publishing their content for the warm fuzzy feeling of seeing their visitor count go up. They’re running businesses. If you’re dead set on not paying and not seeing ads, it’s actually better for them that you don’t visit the site at all.
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.
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.
Yes it does, from nytimes actual earning release for Q 2025:
1. The Company added approximately 450,000 net digital-only subscribers compared with the end of the third quarter of 2025, bringing the total number of subscribers to 12.78 million.
2. Total digital-only average revenue per user (“ARPU”) increased 0.7 percent year-over-year to $9.72
2025 subscription revenue was 1.950 billion dollars. Advertising was 565 million that includes 155 million dollars worth of print advertising.
Sure operating profit is only 550 million very close to the advertising revenue, but the bulk of their income is subscriptions, they could make it work if they had to. My suspicion is that if they dropped all the google ads they could have better subscription retention and conversion rates as well.
But at least in terms of the headline metric of bandwidth, it's somewhat less horrifying. With my ad-blocker off, Firefox showed 44.47mb transferred. Of that 36.30mb was mp4 videos. These videos were journalistic in nature (they were not ads).
So, yes in general, this is like the Hindenburg of web pages. But I still think it's worth noting that 80% of that headline bandwidth is videos, which is just part of the site's content. One could argue that it is too video heavy, but that's an editorial issue, not an engineering issue.
It’s a news site with a lot of auto-playing video. If you like that kind of content, great. If not, there’s lots of other websites with different mixes of content. I subscribe to the economist which has few videos and they never auto play.
But that’s a question of taste. 5mb of JavaScript and hundreds of tracking assets is not.
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.
Are the few cents you get from antagonizing users really worth it?
I suspect the answer is simple and that most users don’t give a shit
I think it has to do a lot with when you came of age - I’m in my late 30s, I got my first tech job at 14 as a sys admin for a large school district, and every single developer, admin, etc that I knew was already going on about the free internet. As a result, I’ve never had a tolerance for anything but the most reasonable advertisements
I think that ideology is necessary to care enough and be motivated enough to really get rid of ads, how fucking awful the websites are alone should be enough but for most people it isn’t
A comparison of CPU usage for idling popular webpages: https://ericra.com/writing/site_cpu.html
Regarding tracker domains on the New Yorker site: https://ericra.com/writing/tracker_new_yorker.html