I feel this is more an indictment of Canadian data prices than Reddit’s bloat.
Why on Earth is it so expensive?
Why on Earth is it so expensive?
Both an indictment of general bloat and Canada data prices.
More interesting is how much it costs for people in poorer countries — Where the absolute value of visiting a site is less, but relative to income is far greater.
Understandably you don't see much about this online — people with expensive data plans don't use it all up complaining about it online.
In Poland it's around 0.25$ per GB for mobile networks. So 1MB is 0.00025$ and a visit to reddit according to the above calculations would be 0.0003475$.
The prices in the US and Canada are ridiculous from that perspective.
India has incredibly cheap data. While Mauritania has the most expensive in the world compared with the average income.
The prices in the US aren't actually a serious problem any longer (they were if you go back 10 years, before T-Mobile's climb changed the market). Americans can trivially afford it given their disposable incomes at the median are among the highest on the planet. US plan prices have declined over the past ten years in nominal terms, while inflation has eroded another 30% of the price. $50-$60 is a nearly meaningless part of the average person's monthly budget in the US now (the median full-time income is $50,000, and Americans have low taxes at the median, which is where the high disposable incomes come from). Nobody is better at wasting money than Americans, they're thrilled to do it, you can tell judging by how they so willingly vaporize their disposable income on consumer garbage. And US plans typically have plenty of data with them these days, whereas Canada gets the worst of both outcomes (terrible data packages and very high prices).
People come on HN and say things like: well I'm in Latvia and I pay €12 and get unlimited data. Well yeah, adjust that to the US and it's €48 (~$56). Now you've got a T-Mobile plan in the US at that price, so what. Or someone will say I'm in Britain and I pay £25; yeah that's not cheap either, that's about $50x when you adjust it to the US for USD and incomes.
I agree in general. I have added a 3rd line to my plan and am spending less than 1/3 of what I spent 10 years ago on 2 lines.
I pay $23 including taxes and fees for two unlimited Sprint lines.
Admittedly, one is the $15 Kickstart plan available for two weeks in June 2018, and the other is a free line that Sprint last year gave out to almost everyone with at least one paid line.
But if I didn't have such plans, I'd pay $25 (after joining a discount group, which is trivial) for unlimited prepaid service from Visible. Or $30 for unlimited from Mint. Etc., etc.
>People come on HN and say things like: well I'm in Latvia and I pay €12 and get unlimited data. Well yeah, adjust that to the US and it's €48 (~$56).
Correct. Further, that US plan provides service everywhere in the country, from San Diego to Portland (either one), from Seattle to Miami, from Honolulu to Anchorage to Charlotte. Yes, there are European mobile plans that also offer all-inclusive coverage across the continent, but the super-cheap plans that are cited in these sorts of discussions usually aren't among them.
1.3mb seems optimised to me at first glance
VLC is one of the more complex programs out there, and yet the VLC binaries and the libvlc libraries they ship with total only 1.295 MiB on my computer.
The main application for Scid, a chess database program, is only 1.1 MiB. (The program also comes with a simple test chess engine and some opening books, so the overall package is somewhat larger.)
The binary and libraries for hexchat, an IRC application, total 1.22 MiB.
The program files for Pinta, an image editing program, come in right at 1.3 MB.
The vast majority of programs are under 10 MiB total. Moreover, I've tried to pick relatively full featured desktop apps, and desktop apps as a rule do more than any 1 MB web page. And these applications come in highly compressed archives, which means that their download size is often significantly less.
Furthermore, I would argue that web pages are rarely comparable to applications. When you're browsing Reddit, if the home page is 1.3 MiB on mobile, chances are the first individual post you click on is also going to be 1.3 MiB, and the one after that, and so on. You don't get the benefits of Reddit by downloading an "application" one time and getting tiny updates after that. If you're lucky most of the libraries being pulled in will get cached, but frequently it doesn't work out that way. On desktop Reddit, a warm refresh of the site still used more than 2.5 MiB for me, and that's with an ad blocker enabled.
Some of the cause of all this has to do with market forces and prioritizing speed of development over customer experience. But I don't think that's the whole story.
There's a furniture chain here that has a website so terrible, I just gave up on trying to buy what I wanted from them. So much happening in JavaScript to make things happen on the page. I have to imagine it's also terribly written, since it freezes up the tab most of the time, and Firefox suggests killing the script.
I have an extension on my Firefox to always load the old reddit. There is an account-specific setting to always load old reddit, but there are times when I browse without an account.
Now to accept cookie policies you need first to accept being redirected into the new site, and then manually return to old version.
I bet in about one year time the old is gone.
If you drop support for MSIE 11 and only support modern browsers the modern javascript is surprisingly compact.
But then your CV looks stupid: no frameworks on the list. How would you ever get a job again?
How do you get any respect if you say "I just code javascript directly on the browser", sounds like you're too stupid to learn a framework.
You will only get respect from the very best developers but not all the copy/paste 'developers', no respect from the HR department nor mediocre managers.
It's an uphill battle.
React is about 110kB. Vue is 33kB. It's perfectly possible (and really not that hard) to write fast, small web apps with the big popular JS frameworks. It's the thoughtless stuff people do—pulling in huge libraries for tiny features, mandating the use of huge analytics packages, etc—that cause the bloat.
Whether it should all just be server-rendered is a whole other argument, but if you're going to build something the size and scale of reddit as a client-rendered app, you'd be crazy to not use one of the existing frameworks IMO. If for no other reason than you're likely to end up just re-creating a worse version of them.
But a lot of the complaints in this thread boil down to modern sites being slow to run on computers that are only a few years old. If modern frameworks are to blame for that, it's not because they're a hundred (or more) KB. It's because they require the end user to run way more Javascript in the browser and consume far more memory than a site with minimal Javascript requires to accomplish the same thing.
As a random example, Firefox's about:performance page says that the three YouTube tabs I have open are each consuming about 50 MB of my computer's memory. That's obscene. (None of the tabs are open on a video, so this is not the result of storing videos in RAM.)
Also, I did a Lighthouse analysis of the Reddit home page in Chrome (on Desktop, but targeting mobile). The page scores less than 20/100 on performance, and takes almost twenty seconds to become interactive!! The biggest problem Lighthouse sees with the page is not the file size, but the amount of Javascript being executed. There's ~25 seconds of "main thread work" being done in my test.
On the contrary, I'm pretty sure you could make Reddit a usable site in everything down to text-based browsers (static HTML + small bits of JS), and still have it be faster and smaller than what the new version is today.
"Modern" development is a horrible bloated mess.
I agree with the rest of your comment, however; and perhaps the solution is to not hire only "web developers", as those whose full-time job isn't to work on that stuff seem to be far better at not adding "padding" for the sake of "CV-driven development", when they are actually asked to work on websites.
I've had a few experiences with that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23590137
> "Prices were collected from the operator with the largest marketshare in the country, using the least expensive plan with a (minimum) data allowance of 500 MB over (a minimum of) 30 days. Prices include taxes. Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios."
I disagree that it is necessarily the "best case" but it is a sensible way to count. Depending on the specific offering you may get unexpected results. For example, the 500MB plan may be barely cheaper than a 10GB plan, which can make sense if with that 500MB you are mostly paying for phone calls and SMS. Heavy internet users will most likely pick a plan with much more data that will be more expensive per month, but way cheaper per byte.
Also, it is split into two section: prepaid and postpaid, and Canada is at $0.07 postpaid. They just picked the highest number on the list.
You have it backwards. The chart says $0.17 postpaid, $0.07 prepaid.
The chart implies a cost of 120 USD per GB, which implies it's based on a 500MB/month plan costing 60 USD. There's no way in hell the cheapest way to get 500MB in Canada costs 60 USD. I'm in Canada and I pay 40 USD for 8GB per month.
The only way I figure they can get to such an absurd number is that no one sells 500MB plans in Canada anymore, so they had to choose a zero data plan + 500MB of additional data to make up a "500MB" plan. With my carrier, additional data is 104 USD per GB.
My anecdotal guess is that the infrastructure costs are higher in Canada due to lower population density. Lots more area to cover to achieve the same coverage.
Other countries like Australia have similar densities and infrastructure costs yet still have way lower prices. The Canadian telecom industry is sheltered and there's really only 3 big players. Foreign competition isn't allowed so there's no possibility of Verizon or Vodafone coming in and shaking things up.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-t... https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-po...
I'm not posting enough references here, but this whole conversation has been so limited in facts and proportion.
The point is the government wants carriers to provide service everywhere, which includes places like Nunavut, 0.019 persons per square mile.
There are local initiatives, and some are really fantastic, but it's difficult to bootstrap those everywhere.
Go to https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/fourprov.htm and search for Nunavut and see who comes up.
These prices need to come down, more competition and local initiatives need to happen, and more innovation for systems like mesh networks. It is particularly upsetting when ways can't be found to share infrastructure. But if providing access to every Canadian is the goal (rather than for every person in a city at a cost less than a bag of groceries) there is probably some logic to the existing system.
Some people will say "just pay for Starlink everywhere," but it's really not ok for a country's access to be owned by another country (as long as Musk is still on earth), wired ultimately has advantages, and there are probably benefits to supporting wired infrastructure, and competition and choice are important.
The cost difference between Telstra and Telus/Bell/Rogers is double, but over a month tens of dollars is not a significant part of a budget, and when consuming video &c there's really not that much different between 30 - 40 GB (unlimited is another story). For people on a very limited budget, there are lower cost plans, but even with the Telstra plan it's not comparable to wired.
Don't get me wrong, I think Canada, right or wrong, coddles these big carriers as a defence against international players, which creates an uneven playing field here (sharing infrastructure at competitive rates seemed like a fair recourse). I am just trying to bring more perspective to the table than "Ontario has a high density so should be cheap," besides the obvious "we are not just talking about Ontario or Toronto here."
Wired is the real thing to discuss here, and what may get lost in the shuffle.
The population density of the areas people live (that actually have telco service) is much much much higher than 14 people per sq. km.
The Greater Toronto Area has a population density of 849/sq. km[1]. Why are its prices not lower than, or at least comparable to all of Europe?
Revolut had to quit the canadian market because of the cartel banks..
There is one thing to note is that there are similar observations for other market segments like cars. People will pay up to 20% more for the same car in Canada vs. the US. I remember when I lived in Canada I saw multiple news segments with the gov't getting angry that Canadians were going to the US to buy new cars in order to save money. During one news segment, the Canadian car dealer being interviewed replied with "Canadians are just willing to pay more," when asked why cars are more expensive in Canada.