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Comment by vlucas | Hacker News Reader

This "stupid thing" was the right thing to do for end users. They come to our website to see pictures of properties they are looking for. We just made them ~100px wider. They were literally smaller than a 256x256 map tile. It also matches the image thumbnail sizes of its sister site as well (which were already larger), which was mentioned specifically at the end of the article (I doubt you made it that far).

Beyond that, page speed is a ranking factor in Google, so it's absolutely not "stupid" to pay attention to it and make small changes that improve it: https://searchengineland.com/google-speed-update-page-speed-...

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Why was it right for end users?

From what I can tell, it just wasn't wrong for end users.

I don't think this was the right thing to do for end users. The largest perceived element on the page is still the map on the right, and it takes as much time to load as before the change.

They are just gaming the metrics changing what the LCP measures with no added value to the users.

The whole map, yes - and it still is the largest element on the page by far. The LCP score was being based on each map tile.

> was the right thing to do for end users.

Only because the company made the change anyway on a sister site, for an unrelated reason, and hadn't bothered to make the same change here.

Because a 230px thumbnail is hard to see and was unnecessarily small on most modern devices and screen resolutions. It's the reason we changed it in ApartmentGuide.com too.

"Google's stupid system reminded us to propagate a change we'd already made on another site for pure usability reasons" is not at all a bad thing but I think the general tenor of the responses here makes it clear that the blog post didn't make it obvious that was a reasonable tl;dr.

(I thought I'd read to the end but hadn't realised that was the tl;dr until I read your comments, FWIW)

Why is making the site slower the right thing for end users?

It didn't make the site measurably slower. We specifically tested this. We already optimize in other ways and lazy-load most of the property images. The only ones that load right away are the first 3 property images in the list.

You have a test showing that after sending X bytes, Y additional bytes take 0 time to arrive?

This is impossible to achieve in the real world. Load times have a lot of variance. Our tests were performance neutral after the change.

In a vacuum yes more data = longer load, but that's not how it plays out in a real browser. Things load in parallel, things block in certain parts but not others, etc. So yes, you really can sometimes send more bytes with no impact on total load time. It just depends on what they are, where they are, and how they load.

I read your article several times, because I was incredulous at the tone that was being used in the writing.

This is an extraordinary Goodhart's Law example.

For the last half decade, if your users are accessing your website through a search query that isn't your site name, you have the wrong audience

SEO is a fools errand that should be relegated to history books

People click-thru from social media and chat apps, not type

> For the last half decade, if your users are accessing your website through a search query that isn't your site name, you have the wrong audience

Hard disagree on this. How am I supposed to discover rentpath.com if I don't know I'm looking for it? But if I'm looking to "connect with prospective renters by offering powerful digital marketing and leasing solutions," like the marketing copy on their landing page says, I can easily see myself landing on rentpath.com.

Tell me: did you literally type "hacker news" into google in order to discover this site?

You discover it because its going viral already on your ads and feeds

Or the search query you did use was shared to the data broker and now whats going viral to you already matches what you would have looked for

Not advocating for this, it also drives traffic and is whats happening right now

Its not important that rentpath or some other service you never heard of was what you picked, only their ad spend and ongoing virality is important as they rely on a predicted distribution of the population to be shown their service and click through

> Or the search query you did use was shared to the data broker and now whats going viral to you already matches what you would have looked for

This sounds like a conspiracy theory. Search engines generally aren't sharing your queries?

Uhm ok 2010 called

Its not important which specific service shares what when they all use the same concepts or an analytics package they added happens to be doing that without the developer/executive’s specific knowledge

Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing are all using 1P scripts.

I've got an adblocker and no 'feeds', but here you are acting like my money doesn't spend.

I runs a niche news site (not in English). Our traffic from search engine for keywords related to our niche isn't insignificant.

Nope not based on my experience,

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