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Comment by andrewvc | Hacker News Reader

What’s the point of loading a page in 500ms if the real problem people are dealing with is a glut of content and fierce competition for our attention.

I wonder if a slower web might be a better web in many ways.

Reduced page load speeds increase engagement. What if I want to decrease engagement with the internet?

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That's easy enough to simulate on Linux if you want to try. Replace eth0 with your wan interface. Re-paste the "del" lines to clear the added latency. If testing this on a remote host I would suggest adding a cron job to run the "del" lines every 10 minutes. I am typing this from memory so it may not work quite right. Use "tc -s -p qdisc" to get the packet statistics. All of these commands need to be run as root or with sudo.

    # outbound qdisc
    tc qdisc del dev eth0 root    > /dev/null 2>&1
    tc qdisc del dev eth0 ingress > /dev/null 2>&1
    tc qdisc add dev eth0 root netem delay 250ms 20ms

    # inbound qdisc
    modprobe ifb numifbs=1 && ip link set dev ifb0 up
    tc qdisc del dev ifb0 root    > /dev/null 2>&1
    tc qdisc del dev ifb0 ingress > /dev/null 2>&1
    tc qdisc add dev ifb0 root netem delay 250ms 20ms

250ms 20ms means add a latency of 250ms with a variability of 20ms. This test will break at some point but one could test the impact of this using a speed test [1][2]

[1] - https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest#

[2] - https://fast.com/

What if I want to shop for my groceries without waiting 10 seconds for Costco's app to load and then NOT have the "Grocery" button jump up half a page just as I'm about to tap it because a deals section below it just got finished dynamically loading?

> What if I want to shop for my groceries without waiting 10 seconds for Costco's app to load and then NOT have the "Grocery" button jump up half a page just as I'm about to tap it because a deals section below it just got finished dynamically loading?

Drive to Costco?

Never again.

Loading a webpage slower isn't going to do anybody any good, especially not when someone is trying to complete important tasks.

If someone wants to decrease engagement with the internet then they should use it less.

If your problem is with the attention economy and media overload, then your problem is more likely with apps and sites that are specifically tailored to addict the user, rather than the fast speeds that admittedly enable them.

Just did a quick Google, looks like plugins for this exist on both Firefox and Chrome!

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