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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, me too ;)

But he also says this:

> I bet if you went to a client and presented a 200 kilobyte site template, you’d be fired. Even if it looked great and somehow included all the tracking and ads and social media crap they insisted on putting in. It’s just so far out of the realm of the imaginable at this point.

If that's possible, I'm getting that bloat stems from sloppy implementation of all sorts. Fonts. Ads. Tracking. All of it. I suspect that the copy-and-paste approach accounts for a lot of it. And using third-party resources, such as Disqus for comments.

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> And using third-party resources, such as Disqus for comments.

I actually kinda like disqus. Centralized notifications for replies and no more signing up in order to post a comment (for the users), and as a site op I don't have to deal with spam, people trying to XSS my comments and especially: I can statically cache ALL the content and even run without any database at all!

OK, so I shouldn't have included Disqus under sloppy ;) You do get secure managed comments. But isn't there a bloat cost, too? There are also security and privacy risks in using third parties.

Yep. Disqus is one of the more understandable shifts-to-bloat which developers have made in recent years. Understandable because spammers have made it so difficult to run our own comments. The selfish anti-social behaviour of this small minority of "SEO experts" ends up forcing everyone into tech choices we should otherwise be avoiding.

spot on. however, network trust issues are behind so many reasons why we can't have nice stuff... naive initial approaches to network-sharing of resources + lots of papering over = 20+ years of broken web

Disqus often shows a spinning wheel forever on mobile devices with no way to reload except reloading the whole page and waiting and scrolling down and crossing the finger that Disqus may display the comments this time, only to find out: nope. It seems Disqus peaked, and their product quality tanked. I cringle when I see embedded Facebook comments too, though they get less and less - nevertheless FB comments always worked on all devices.

Nowadays many websites don't offer comment sections at all. Probably because it was too much effort on their side to clean up the spam, etc - sad development. Often a captcha would preventvmost spam and idiots from posting shit.

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