Always Coming Home

The Website Obesity Crisis

tweedymcgee:

tweedymcgee:

typicalacademic:

argumate:

absolute gold from start to finish

although my first memory of the word “bloat” is referring to software that couldn’t fit on a single floppy disk…

In fact, let’s be even bolder in our thinking. I’m not convinced that online publishing needs to be ad-supported at all.

People dismiss micropayments, ignoring the fact that we already have a de facto system of micropayments that is working well.

This chart from the New York Times shows how much money you spend per page load on an American cell phone network, based on the bandwidth used. For example, it costs thirty cents to load a page from Boston.com on a typical data plan.

This is nothing more than a micropayment to the telecommunications company. And I’m sure it’s more revenue than Boston.com sees from the ad impressions on the page.

We’re in a stupid situation where ads make huge profits for data carriers and ad networks, at the expense of everyone else.

There’s a lot of whipsmart stuff here, and I’d love to give it a thumbs-up, but my throat just closed up in horror at the thought-experiment of putting telcoms in charge of what gets printed on Boston.com. 

“Working well”? What the absolute fuck. Just because money is flowing somewhere doesn’t mean it’s doing the thing you want it to do; i.e., supporting God damned content creation.* 

Figure that one out, smart guy. 

“ignoring the fact that we already have a de facto system of micropayments that is working well” 

FIXING PROBLEMS IS EASY WHEN YOU ONLY CARE ABOUT SOLVING FOR ONE VARIABLE, YOU FATSHAMING SMUG FUCK.

*I’d say “journalism,” but, you know, I feel dirty even uttering it. Increasingly.

P.S. I know you mean well, smart computer guy.

*fossicks about on smart computer guy’s website*

“The prognosis for publishers is grim. Repent! Find a way out of the adtech racket before it collapses around you. Ditch your tracking, show dumb ads that you sell directly (not through a thicket of intermediaries), and beg your readers for mercy. Respect their privacy, bandwidth, and intelligence, flatter their vanity, and maybe they’ll subscribe to something.” 

*grits teeth, makes pained noise*

This is on my dash again, so I’ll say something a little more smart then I did the first time around.

Do you see this?

this is a staggering amount of HTTP requests.

on my vacation cellular internet, it took a full 1.2 minute to load—with every image cached

and look at what he gets for those 130 pre-loaded images:

this is not good design! obviously he selected this format to make a point, but holy hell—I didn’t see a single image from his “talk”. if those images aren’t important, why not just replace them with a picture of Trump?? I get the same knee-jerk reationary traditionalism, with 1/130th the load speed.

I gave up the first time around when he started whining about the “adtech bubble” “all competing for the same little slice of your online spending” with a picture of 32 basically unrelated industries—things like Rails, Joomla and Wordpress grouped with Youtube, b2b companies like Atlassian, Trello and Slack, first-party analytics, and then somewhere around the bottom of that actual normal ad companies. The “bubble” argument has been refuted so many times that I can’t believe people are still making it (to be fair, he’s disguising it a little bit by being careful to qualify it as an “ad tech” bubble)

not to mention his actual arguments are completely devoid of any actual substance too. when he draws his little cute diagrams with bigger arrows and smaller errors, does he actually expect us to believe that he’s making a convincing argument? I could draw the exact same diagrams with bigger arrows ins some places and smaller arrows in others, and it would be just as convincing. 

I almost gave up the second time around when he started whining about scrollbars and “chickenshit aesthetic”, (most of his complaints seem to be centered around scrollbars because ??? most random rant ever imo) but I soldiered on.

I mostly agree with his last few paragraphs—it would have been a much better article if he started off and stayed there. Regurgitating the same tired arguments about design, bloat, and bubbles distract from his main conclusion and incredibly weaken the piece. Does he have some points about the ad industry and the expectation of trackers upon trackers upon trackers. Yes, obviously. But invoking a “bubble” is not the right way to go about it—it comes off as self-congratulatory and hurts his call to arms (“ah, yes, the ad industry is Terrible and Doomed to Failure, that way I can comfortably relax secure in the knowledge that the things I hate about them will soon go away”)

followup post coming