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Comment by i_like_robots | Hacker News Reader

I'm super pleased to see the FT towards the top of the charts. It's a couple of years since I worked on the project[1] to make it faster and it's really great the team have been able to keep it that way.

We bet on measuring site speed with user centered metrics early on which was going against the grain at the time - removing above the fold CSS, are you crazy!? It took a lot of demos to convince people that what we were doing was faster, and that they really needed to trust their own eyes even when the tools disagreed!

Keep it up, folks.

[1]: https://medium.com/ft-product-technology/designing-a-sustain...

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Somewhat ironic to host a performance-oriented article on Medium. It took about 1-2 seconds before the text appears (in a mostly text article), even though I have a really good internet connection right now (ping to medium.com average ~20ms, upload/download speed is ~930Mbps). Doesn't seems it's a one time thing either, hard-refresh of the page leads to same behavior.

Tell me about it!

"Chickenshit Minimalism - The illusion of simplicity backed by megabytes of cruft."

https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1...

(The article is also available on my personal site - about 18kb all in - for anybody who would like to read it not on a slow and increasingly walled garden website.)

My least favorite part of Medium (and why I actively avoid it) is the incredible amount of recommended threads/articles focused on bad-faith arguments from neonazis or religious extremist views.

"Bad faith" isn't the right characterization. Neonazis and religious extremists believe what they're saying, and they're not trying to con you or humiliate you, they're trying to convince you.

One of the many reasons to use a redirect extension or something to replace medium with scribe, e.g. https://scribe.rip/ft-product-technology/designing-a-sustain... - compare that experience

wow, what a different user experience!

Which redirect extension do you use?

I really didn't realize how much I dislike Medium as a reader until now. I guess I got used to waiting 3-5 seconds to get the content. What's even worse is the constant noise, some of which stays even after the initial loading phase: cookie banner, login with Google, "applaud the article" (or whatever Medium's like button is), stats about the creator and the post, 5 different containers to ask me to read something else immediately...

No wonder most of the time I don't get to read a full article on Medium: they constantly bother me to do anything else but reading the article.

Congrats on the job you people have done, it's really super, duper fast compared to most of the other news resources out-there. The first page layout is also quite helpful, you can skim it really fast and get an idea of "what's happening" (I'm doing that two, three times per day with with the ft.com first page).

I hate to rain on the parade but there's no way FT should be up there with USA today. I clicked these (being the top two). USA today was almost instantaneous. I was excited to get some more serious focus news at what this index said would be a comparable speeed. 8 seconds. 8 seconds to settle down. 3 of which basically blank screen.

Good decision to focus on user perceived performance rather then "Google/SEO performance". Also returning user experience, and actual user experience (using the site app/as a user) is very important meanwhile most only measure first load performance.

This is awesome! I hope more news websites take notice of this report and clean up their act to make things faster.

great work to you and the team. I absolutely adore the FT website. the subscription is worth every penny and a large part is the user experience for me

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