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Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

Measuring "the web" based on amount of bandwidth used is kind of a ridiculous metric. Time spent engaging (or some such metric) with a particular internet service might be more relevant.

Video uses a seriously disproportionate amount of bandwidth per use.

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Next up: Ants are extinct! Their proportion of total mass compared to elephants is almost zero.

I see you point but...

"Their proportion of total mass compared to elephants is almost zero."

...that...doesn't seem true.

Hold on, I'll make a graph to prove it to you.

A graph on relative usage was used to prove something absolute...and you offering a graph on relative mass to prove relative mass...so almost but not quite. I didn't see anyone dispute the accuracy of the graph. People balked at the notion that the graph is proof that the web is dead.

"On average, ants monopolize 15–20% of the terrestrial animal biomass"

http://www.pnas.org/content/97/26/14028.full

Elephants are almost extinct because their proportion of mass is almost zero compared to ants!

That would be funnier if elephants were not, in fact, perilously close to being extinct, especially in the wild.

This thread is like a demolition derby for metaphors.

Tangent interested should check out http://www.greenermedia.com/hec.html for more on HEC(human elephant conflict) and to read about their recent trip to Sri Lanka(second) to finish filming a documentary called Common Ground. Can't wait to see it! Elephants and rural farmers need all the help they can get.

Also: Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society www.slwcs.org

This is one of the things I love about HN. Someone makes a flippant comment and I get to learn something interesting cause someone else posts a response like it was a serious statement. I find myself correcting people's flippant comments often, or at least thinking about doing it, and most people just seem annoyed. I really enjoy learning something new even if it's tangential to the topic at hand.

There was a fascinating discussion on how geeks are not like other people in this regard:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1080272

This is one of the things I love about this site.

Right now, I'm half tempted to see if I can find something to submit or discuss that will lead to other tangents relevant to my interests.

It's funny, because I think I was interested in the Y-combinator itself when I came here...

That was StavrosK's whole point, he's obviously aware of it or he wouldn't have picked that particular example.

Give the guy some credit.

Thanks, it's a bit odd that people didn't get it from picking a ubiquitous, numerous species versus one that's almost extinct...

I actually had to laugh when reading it the first time because it seemed such a neat spoof on the article in so few words. You could have used bacteria or insects just the same. Just goes to show that there are many well known facts that turn out to be not that well known after all.

Perhaps your original intent would have been more immediately obvious if you had chosen a different animal that's also almost extinct, but not synonomous in people's minds with large size more so than the fact of their near extinction? Or was that also part of the original intent?

I admit that the analogy is a bit leaky, but the point is that ants are nowhere near extinct, even though they may be much smaller than elephants. Where it breaks down is if you consider the number of ants vs elephants globally. I probably shouldn't have said "total" mass, just relative mass.

Completely off-topic, but a quick google seach interestingly implies that ants hold a significant portion of animal biomas:

On average, ants monopolize 15–20% of the terrestrial animal biomass, and in tropical regions where ants are especially abundant, they monopolize 25%

http://www.pnas.org/content/97/26/14028.full

I didn't have as much luck finding a quick elephant biomass estimate. But giving a generous estimate of 1 million elephants, and the upper limit of the weigh of the larger African elephant at 26,000 pounds we can guess that elephant biomass is less than 26 billion pounds. Considering that's less than the biomass of humans in the US, I'd say ants probably actually do compare well to elephants in proportion of total biomass.

I apologize for any pedantry, but it was actually a question that piqued my curiosity.

I know, otherwise I wouldn't have picked an endangered species versus one that sends a billion members whenever you have a picnic! :p

Not only this, but isn't video delivered over ... the web?

Well if you define the web as 'HTTP traffic on port 80' then... yes, a lot of it is. A lot is also delivered over RTMP (ie, streamed Flash video).

edit: RTMP not RTSP (that's Windows Media, Quicktime etc).

Which means that as streaming video moves from Flash to HTML5, web traffic (according to your definition) will actually increase.

If you define the Web instead as "stuff that happens in web browsers" then... you come to the same conclusion. What definition of the Web would not include all this video traffic?

I could see someone being interested in subsets, but yeah, they don't have a definition here. One that might be interesting is: what amount of time do people spend reading mainly textual documents online? That'd correspond somewhat to a classical view of the web as hypertext (you know, a "web" of interlinked documents).

That would, though, have to exclude not only watching videos, but also paying your credit-card bill on a bank's website, and other such web-as-thin-client rather than web-as-documents uses. Forums like this also occupy a weird place, since they're somewhat more like web-as-listserv/usenet-replacement than web-as-documents.

But, I'm not sure the end result would actually show a decline anyway. Wikipedia and blogs, for example, are more or less hypertext documents in the old sense of the term, just with some new conventions for organizing and editing them. Wikipedia alone probably rivals (exceeds?) the entire mid-1990s internet in size and readership.

This whole logic train is pretty much made of awesome.

I was laughing pretty hard by the "elephants are nearly extinct" comment.

Exactly. If I watched HD video on my iPhone, I would destroy my 2GB cap very quickly. But I can use the web and play QRANK and such constantly for a month and barely put a dent in it.

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