Comment by zenhack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zenhack | Hacker News Reader

> Take my colleague Connie Loizos’ article from yesterday reporting on a new venture fund. The text itself is about 3.5 kilobytes uncompressed, but the total payload of the page if nothing is cached is more than 10 MB, or more than 3000x the data usage of the actual text itself. This pattern has become so common that it has been called the website obesity crisis. Yet, all of our research shows people want high-definition images with their stories, instant loading of articles on the site, and interactivity. Those features have to be paid somehow, begetting us the advertising and subscription models we see today.

It was kindof upsetting to read this after having switched the article into Firefox's reader mode, because the page was completely unusable.

If you want to talk about consumers' wallets not existing in a vacuum: if your 3.5 KB article is sending me 10 megs of crap, then your mobile users' carriers are charging them more than the advertizers are paying you.

There are some real challenges in figuring out how to fund journalism, but if bandwidth is one of them you're doing something very wrong.

There are glaring optimization issues.

Over 6MB of those 10MB is just one bloated photo [1]. It can be compressed down to 1-2MB. Moreover, if it was a proper responsive image, it would not be larger than 100-200 KB for most readers because a good JPEG compressor can pull 2 bits per pixel [2].

Ironically, image optimization apps don't get that much coverage.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/vikbajaj20...

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04416.pdf

I just took that image (which is 3300 x 2200), resized it to 50% and got 1.05 MiB, instead of 5.85. Threw it through JPEGMini (a paid product, mind you) and got 729 KiB.

Guetzli is nice, but it's slow as balls. JPEGMini is a decent alternative. (I'm a happy customer of JPEGMini, BTW. No other affiliations.)

I'm making something in between [1].

That image is a good example for any perceptual encoder. At 50% size it's 600KB (487KB with current master), and there's still a lot to be unhappy about, e.g. a hidpi image like that can be compressed a lot harder.

[1] https://getoptimage.com

I use firefox on mobile for ad-blocking and reader mode. Sometimes I get frustrated when firefox gets unstable and try chrome, but the lack of a proper reader mode and no way to disable ads makes half the internet completely unusable. I find it hard to believe that average chrome using consumers are doing anything more than tolerating the current state of the web.

Mobile users and rural satellite users like me. I was also struck by:

> We didn’t need paywalls on the early web because we focused on plain text from other users. Plain text is easier to produce, lowering the friction for people to contribute, and it’s also cheaper to store and transmit, lowering the cost of bandwidth.

I still want plain text, and I think there must be others like me — we just want to read what they have to say, which is more immersive than the ten megabytes of dreck they sent me could possibly be.

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