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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

Maybe if you paid for your content it would suck less. The problem is no-one wants to pay for content, so they have to pay for it with ads, which means satisfying the true customer, the advertiser. Google tried, for a while, non-cruft ads, but eventually the demand for more sensational advertising is what drives most of this cruft.

Another driver, which is something front-end devs can do something about, is to stop shipping 20MB bundles to the browser, stop using 10MB of fonts, and stop front-loading 200MB of images. Ignorant use of powerful tools that make adding more and more resources to your project feel basically free are a big contributor, at least in the webapp space. (Classic CMS software also accretes cruft, but generally more slowly over time.)

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You think I wanted 10MB of fonts? Nope. Talk to Public Affair's design team.

You believe I wanted 200MB of images? Wrong. I wanted text, maybe some thumb-nails with pop-up images. But the photography group has to exist for a reason.

20MB bundles of Javascript? Sorry, but between the trackers marketing wanted and the fact that my boss' boss wants to have some hip new framework on his resume means I'm stuck when maybe just some jQuery would have done the job.

You are thinking about the web circa 1995, with the Webmaster being the master. That's been gone for a while. We implement what others demand, and they don't care if it is slow on other machines, they don't give a damn if it isn't accessible, and they could care less if the content is essentially empty, just pictures of people smiling because they chose this product. We're really not in charge of this unless this is a passion project personal site or we're some scrappy little startup.

Bingo. The technical decisionmaking has been delegated to product managers with business degrees who have probably never even used the product they're demanding be riddled with hundreds of KB of digital litter, much less written a single line of code. Capitalism will kill us all.

This has nothing to do with capitalism, it is about engineers being overridden. You can find all kinds of similar hideous stories under communism, and more, with its fixation on central planning. Any system which decouples decision-making from local ground-truth wisdom will run into this kind of error.

> Maybe if you paid for your content it would suck less

Haha, maybe, but I really don't think so. People pay for cable and still get ads; people pay for Netflix and still get ads, I still got ads when on Youtube Premium, etc. Even outside of media consumption, there are countless similar examples.

Perhaps, if content was paid for in juicy frictionless micropayments, the bullshit web would suck less - for a time. But it would begin to suck more and more, until we have the same situation or worse (while still paying, more and more).

The companies pumping out these trackers and selling our data couldn't care less whether people are subscribing to a service or not. They'll offer cash and buy our data until the day that shit is illegal.

The host of a podcast I enjoy held an AMA recently added an anecdote to your, and my, opinion.

While He readily appreciated the Patreon subscribers & tailored special features for their contributions, he admitted the funds from the subscribers were eclipsed by several(?) factors by the ad revenues.

I work for a company where we basically sell access to a SaaS behind a frontend powered by React. The customers pay, very well as I'm led to believe by our figures. There's no advertising. Nobody cares that the frontend is slow, because that slowness is because it's an SPA and that's factored in as a necessary cost of business.

In other words, even if you pay, there's no reason to think the software should be any better.

I pay for a lot of content nowadays, less and less of it on the web. I spend far less time on the web than I used to, and life has become better.

The web is just not a very good medium in general and unfortunately the promise of web search has turned out to be just a chimera. Conventional methods of research or specialized search engines are more time efficient. The only thing the web is good for is cheap stimulation, and even for that it isn’t very good.

> The problem is no-one wants to pay for content, so they have to pay for it with ads, which means satisfying the true customer, the advertiser.

This is sort of like blaming the victim, eh?

If I visited and paid for CNN for several years, I'm still loading the cruft.

I mean, I at times have paid for Hulu and Netflix, and Hulu added ads to its paid content and Netflix is planning to.

Perhaps blaming the user for the economics of online content is insufficient.

Cable television showed that paying to remove ads does not work in the long run.

People who have money to pay for content are precisely the ones you want to show ads to.

You know what? We don't actually need all this content that is being pooped out of everyone. Because most of it's shit, and not worth the time to even watch. Yet people remain convinced that we need it, and some of you remain convinced that they need to pay for it. What a lie.

Burn it all, I say.

It doesn’t matter much if people are willing to pay or not: without a viable method of micro transactions, $5/mo is the next viable tier above free.

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