Comment by hrbf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hrbf | Hacker News Reader

This is a very good idea that I would love to see implemented but it goes against the economic incentives driving websites today.

Lower fidelity would also mean to restrict tracking. Good luck with that. Internet advertising and data mining companies are not exactly renowned for their moral and ethical integrity. They would have no issue draining the data plan of a hurricane victim with ads for homeowners insurance.

It also means more work building those sites. Which is not something I see happening, given that in most projects there is little time to fix structural issues as is. Why fix bugs or optimize payloads when you can ship features?

I would also bet that if lower fidelity meant less (or no) ads, many people would use lower fidelity as a workaround for not having to see them. Which would be exactly what the world needs but is, again, entirely misaligned with most online companies’ economic interests.

Unless the incentives change, websites will continue to bloat until they break.

> Why fix bugs or optimize payloads when you can ship features?

and

> websites will continue to bloat until they break

There's a reason that small startups can shake up an industry and become sudden leaders. Some of them dare to take the unconventional (or uncommon) approach, instead aiming to provide a better service to customers.

So many popular websites today would be infinitely better if they were stripped down to very minimal html and images. Users would probably be more likely to visit them more often. For example, have you ever tried to view cnn.com on a phone? On my relatively high performance iPhone 12 Pro, that website is laggy and full of absolute garbage stuff scattered all around the "content". It's so bad that I rarely go there. The same is true for many other media sites.

TheVerge has just done the same thing, turning what was once a fairly decent site into a clusterf*ck which I no longer visit.

Of course the real problem with many of these sites is that if you strip out the crap, leaving the focus on content, you may find that there really is no content. What's there may be so underwhelming that you leave and never come back. I suspect they know this, so that's why they stuff more and more teaser items on the page. Curiosity is hard to overcome, so viewers will probably stay longer, even if they ultimately leave unsatisfied.

I have tried to view cnn.com on a phone, that's why they provide https://lite.cnn.com/en.

Admittedly, headline authorship has been discarded in favor of clickbait, and text isn't as eye-catching as images, so the site and articles are weirdly uncompelling when compared to the main site or other news sources. Celebrity gossip and scandals just fall flat in text, making it much easier to glean the handful of factual data points from the deluge of noise.

> that's why they provide https://lite.cnn.com/en

That doesn't seem to be the default presentation I get when I browse on my phone, via Firefox or Safari. That a lite version exists is great, but if it's invisible (unless you know, and you enter the URL manually), it might as well not exist.

> but it goes against the economic incentives driving websites today

Tomorrow does not need to be the same as today. It is called progress. It starts with ideas like this.

> websites will continue to bloat until they break.

And this may be the economic incentive driving this progress.

I sincerely hope you’re right on this. But as long as we rely on a monetary system based on capitalism, I don’t see this happen, ever, for any extended period of time.

Even if you threw everything away and started from scratch, as long as you could get away with earning those extra few cents per page impression, it will ultimately be done this way. Given enough time, most will follow and you’re back to square one.

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