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Comment by balls187 | Hacker News Reader

Why does it matter if a user is an HN reader or not?

it does, because we care about a number of things, including: 1. Technical implementation (and alternative ways of implementation). 2. Freedom (keeping things within google's walled-garden or not)

Your average user (who doesn't necessarily know anything about software) doesn't really care about 1, and probably doesn't care about 2. They care about speed of the page, data consumption of the page, and maybe the look-and-feel of the page (bloated vs sane).

When I say HN user, i mean technically informed and most often skeptic people.

The distinction matters.

99% of internet users are average users. All your concerns are fine but at the end of the day when you want to read the news or whatever, speed matters.

Then why doesn't Google rank speedy pages?

It does, since 2010.

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-i...

I'm not convinced that's still true. Obviously I can't see google-rankings internal stuff, but...

If I search for weather, lyrics, or other common sites, the top results are always slow, bloated, JS-filled nightmares. Yet the sites that are quick and small are never to be found.

Maybe they do and they need to weight speed higher. I don't know, but I know that I don't ever seem to get fast loading results.

This feels too much like creating a problem that you want to be able to step in and solve.

The use cases between both groups may be substantially different. Understanding this helps us not draw conclusions from 'how HN users use stuff' and incorrectly applying them to 'how all users use stuff'.

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