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
He's not taking the mickey - he's actually defending himself saying WP are hosting the ads, not him etc...
There are free blog services with more tactful ad strategy I'm sure. I just find this amusing.
Let me just plug the best ad block software - your brain. Unfocus your mind and zone out the ads and they are simply not there any more (or use adblock - does the job for you).
His whole page is only 256kb total. That's nothing (and very normal) compared to many sites that are 1mb of code and various style sheets over riding each other.
I manage a few decently sized blogs for authors and bloggers. From all the checking I've done for these buttons, only Email To A Friend, Facebook, Twitter, and G+ are worth doing.
The others might get 1-10 clicks vs the aforementioned few getting thousands of clicks (or hundreds for G+).
I've gone to just putting Facebook/Twitter/G+/Email, as minimally as possible.
Depends on the crowd. I wrote a blog post called Hackers and Engineers (the target audience is obviously the same people who read Hackers and Painters) [0]. From what I can see, lots of entries, lots of clicks on the links of the blog post, none on the share/tweet/facebook/g+ buttons.
By contrast, I see people clicking on the tweet/share/facebook button for the blog entry where I compared memes to speaking in metaphor ala Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra [1]. They don't click on the links (except to the book Wisdom Sits in Places)
Different crowds of people react differently to those share buttons, I guess. The HN crowd doesn't really click that much.
Yes people use them. They can drive a decent amount of traffic too if they have some alluring and easily digestible content such as the common "list of top 10 bla bla" articles. It is also suspected that Google weighs shared links highly for ranking so just a few shares can give a substantial boost to a page's seo value. Though no one knows for sure how it works.
Using Ghostery here... my initial perception of a site is always based partially on how many entries are blocked on load. I've seen pages with 20+ calls to outside sharing services; at that point, a little extra cynicism kicks in.
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.
I know what brudgers is talking about - I frequently encounter the same frustration when attempting to use Google to find actual information in a space where too many people are trying to make money. The links you see depend on what Google knows about you. I tried the search in an incognito tab, and the pdftohtml link, which would be the most useful result, was nowhere on the first page. When I add the word "linux" to the search, it appears. Not bad at all in this case, but I've been stymied in the past when no combination of keywords and search operators could locate good, technical information that I knew was out there, but instead returned page after page of spam and junk. I know Matt Cutts still claims that there is a firewall between search and ads, and there is no compromise on search quality for profit reasons, but does anyone still believe this?
This whole sub-thread hinges on the assumption that the "pdftohtml" result is objectively the correct one for the the query "convert PDF to HTML", and that it's commercial corruption of Google that keeps that result off the front page. I think that that is a false assumption. If a non-technical user need to convert a PDF to HTML, the pdfonline.com result (the one with the friendly green button) is leaps and bounds better than the pdftohtml SourceForge onw with the broken Windows link. Google doesn't have any kind of obligation to promote FOSS software at any cost, they have an obligation to answer the users question - and in this case it does just that.
Yes, I too have had to sort through pages of various SEO keyword-spam to find what I'm looking for, but the connection from there to this poor example to the number of extraneous elements on a website to accusing Google of having forged a broken web is, well, weak.
Your point about the difficulty in establishing one or another result as objectively better is a good one - though somewhat weakened by then arguing that the online service is better.
However, it is not as if pdftohtml is obscure. It is a common component of a great number of GNU/Linux distributions and has been for many years. So setting aside the merits of the top result, the lower results are still problematic.
Unlike the top result, neither Pdftohtml nor the high ranking results are SaaS - they're downloads for offline use. What differentiates them is their value propositions. They are in opposition between Google and the lay person and the results are caveat emptor solely for Google's benefit.
Elsewhere, I have used a better example, "weather". The top results are advertising revenue driven. The best result? In most cases, the National Weather Service point data - advertising free, updated regularly, and generated by Phd meteorologists, not pretty faces for TV.
In this case, Pdftohtml shows the way in which Google drives us toward online rather than offline solutions. It drives us away from using our CPU cycles and towards consuming bandwidth, and absent that toward tools which pay for advertising.
Perhaps you're right that the connection is becoming tenuous. I, for one, was not assuming that the pdftohtml result was "objectively the correct one"; just that it's obviously more relevant than some, or many, of the results that are ranking higher than it for the query. And it's so common for less relevant or spammy pages to rank higher than more relevant, higher-quality results that I no longer expect the best results to be near the top, nor even on the first page. There are probably many reasons for this, and one reasonable theory is that Google is attempting to increase their profit by driving people to pages that might earn them a commission. Or it might just be that their ranking algorithms, despite being still perhaps better than anyone else's, are fundamentally flawed, and attach too much importance to linkage and not enough to other signals of quality.
The Yellow Pages was called "The Yellow Pages" to distinguish it from the White Pages (and the Blue Pages). Recall that the White Pages contained names and addresses in a (largely) neutral format, and that both individuals and businesses were included.
The service you used was monetized. It just didn't charge you a fee. Instead, it will seek to charge someone else a fee later for data about you. Free doesn't mean "public service."
> Recall that the White Pages contained names and addresses in a (largely) neutral format, and that both individuals and businesses were included.
And still, the Yellow Pages were successful because they were helpful. People liked using them, so businesses were happy to pay for better exposure.
> The service you used was monetized. It just didn't charge you a fee. Instead, it will seek to charge someone else a fee later for data about you. You didn't use a charity.
It's not clear why I should care? They provided me with a valuable service (or they might have been, I was just testing it out), if they can get paid for that, good for them. They didn't ask for any information from me, contact or otherwise, so I doubt the value for resale is very high.
The service requires JavaScript to be turned on in your browser and thus there is little reason to ask you for information, and since you might lie, a good reason not to.
Monetization depends on lack of awareness first and the bother of dealing with ubiquitous attempts at data mining second. Care or care not. There is no should.
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.
Are geeksquad that bad? My dad uses them (although he's very far from being a technophobe - despite spending a lot of time missing MS-DOS) and has had nothing but a good experience as far as I know.
Well, I only have one real datapoint, but I took a look at a laptop a grandmother type had brought to them for help but probably didn't do a very good job explaining what was wrong. It sounded like her email had stopped going in or out, but I had to prompt her a bit. I can't remember precisely what the services rendered were but it came to something close to 200, they sold her a new AV despite her current subscription, av added a toolbar, installed some kind of system cleaner that deleted temp files and browser caches and such once a day, charged her for a "full tuneup" which was nearly half the cost and seemed like maybe a defrag, and $25 to fix her outlook - seems like she had managed to switch to a new blank profile so no mail, no settings, so they switched her back.
I mean, I guess they did fix her problem and I doubt youd have much trouble with them if you have a basic clue, but the people who need that service the most are the exact same ones that have no way to tell if they really do need this thing they're telling you is critical.
Plus I've seen enough online discussion about what techs employer unknown find on hard drives and how much their boss or 4chan enjoyed it to suspect that line of business may not have the strongest of ethical cultures.
There are many terrible reviews of Geek Squad online mostly in the form of reddit threads and the like. Like most issues related to services like this I suspect the people who have had bad experiences with Geek Squad are very loud but they aren't large enough in number to represent the average case.
Ah, Notes; the best UI, bar none. I remember discovering the mail window had NO horizontal scrollbar as I moved the cursor down a line and it skipped to the end of a truly epic set of Received: headers, all on one line, with NO WAY TO GET BACK except holding down the left-cursor key for what felt like an hour...
I later discovered the option to turn the optional horizontal scrollbar back on, in a four level deep menu somewhere. Rage.
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.
> If you want to complain about the state of the Web, at least take into the account that the Web/Hypertext is about more than just text.
Yeah, I was wondering about this. Is he advocating turning the entire web into a text file? How does that even work with content rich websites like twitter or facebook or JS-necessary sites like your favorite music/video streaming site? Yes, encoding text with other technologies to increase the user's experience is going to make your file size bigger, but who cares?
It works poorly. The author makes the mistake in saying that everything that is not text is unnecessary and/or advertisement. There's a lot of cruft on most Web pages, but there's also a lot of valuable non-text info.
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.
Only without parsing all pages through a (rather slow) third party service, but yes parsing all outgoing HN links through Readability by default was another idea that never made it.
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.
He forgot the most important reason why "the internet" sucks, even though the page he's complaining about flaunts a prominent example: stealing content. Check out the unsourced photograph of the two actors. Actually, a second look at all the fluff on the page shows that much of it is itself poking fun at typical bloated websites with cheesy advertising, so this turns out to be a complicated example.
My browser is looking like windows did during XP. Back then, I had a anti virus, a couple of anti-adware, one anti hacking and a firewall installed. After XP, most of that got built in while the momentum of adwares and viruses/worms went down, and today I only got a anti-virus, and even that one is not even doing much (no warnings for the last few years).
My browser however got adblock + extension, noscript, ghostery, https-everywhere, cookie handler, and I have also dabbled with privoxy. One can also add tor to the list.
So I guess, the question will be if the browser manufacturers will do the same as microsoft did and start having a bunch of that built in. Debian-live CD has already started with having adblock pre-installed.
If you wind up using Privoxy, it can take the place of all the other add-ons you mentioned, except https-everywhere. And it works transparently for all browsers.
Yup. He responds to the "pot, kettle, black" observations with a whining "it's not my fault! it'd be better if I had my own server!" (someone point him to a cheap server, please).
This is something I see on The Guardian and it infuriates me no end. I end up randomly clicking on articles, even adverts (deliberate maybe?) accidentally as they load and shove what I wanted to click down the page...
Yes, The Guardian is particularly annoying in this regard. Such a shame because, compared to other newspaper sites, they do an awful lot of things very well indeed. It's particularly a problem with Appple devices which impose a horrible lag between input and action, and causes no end of problems - what the hell is up with that?!
This is why whenever I open an article or blog post, the first thing I do before even trying to read the article is click the "readability" button (or pocket/instapaper/safari reader/whichever one you like). I appreciate what the person above said "take into the account that the Web/Hypertext is about more than just text." That's fine. But unless I'm on my tumblr dashboard, I'm visiting a blog probably to read text.
Branding is important, sure. But you can have great branding and still be readable. You don't need huge style sheets, you don't need a ton of images, you don't need a ton of scripts. Look at Svbtle for example, right? So what's the problem?
"Monetizing content, especially written content, is extremely difficult. I think Svbtle’s biggest innovation will be in this area, but I don’t know what it is yet."[1]
So what's the solution? First of all I love that _most_ of the personal blogs on HN lead by example. Secondly I think adblock and noscript should be encouraged whenever possible (I know there's no way adblock would be rolled in to browsers). Thirdly get native "reader" button in Chrome, FF and IE. Content creators need to make money but until we figure that out, we can't expect users to stare at disgusting web sites for much longer. Or maybe we can, if the state of TV and FM radio advertising teaches us anything... Maybe that's it, most people just deal with it so who cares. Still makes me sad though.
I googled for a list of "top blogs" and found this list[2], amazing how many of them are visually DISGUSTING.
But yes, right now they're really great for usability. Including disabled people; I travel together with a completely blind person together in the bus every day. He uses a computer with a screen reader at his job and at home. Mobile websites are by far the greatest to use. On a sidenote, HTML5 is hardly better than Flash here.
To some extent they try, but it's rather hard. As is Javascript, though JS is slightly better than Flash. I think JS will eventually become much better than Flash, but not very soon.
I've seen some of the new proposed ad-format for applications, they are a lot more intrusive than the one you will find on a webpage.
And that is for a simple reason. On a webpage you can put more ads per page than on mobile.
Say that on your webpage you have 15 different banners on every impression. That's 15 advertisers, with 15 different costs from the local Grocery Store to Coca Cola.
Now on your app you have 1 or 2 banner. The cost of producing the content is the same, but you have 15 times less advertisers, you have to make the ads cost alot more. And to justify that they will be very very intrusive, so much that old web popups seem nice in comparison.
