It would be nice if DoorDash cared as much about their web app performance as they do their native app performance. Their web app perf is abysmal. Pathetically slow. Clicking takes seconds to see a response in the UI.
In all seriousness though, the tech industry is an immense contributor to global warming because of inefficient software which uses large quantities of energy and necessitates the creation of massive quantities of e-waste as older machines are unable to provide an adequate user experience for extremely computationally heavy designs.
Extremely inefficient software which is necessary for everyday tasks also means only the latest hardware from China/Taiwan is competitive. Bad software is a geopolitical and national security risk.
A quick Google search reveals that different sources suggest data centers are responsible for something between 0.2% and 3% of global CO2 emissions. (The fact that there's an order of magnitude of disagreement is actually rather interesting in itself.)
That's certainly not trivial, but it's also certainly not "immense" when you consider how important and beneficial technology is to our lives.
Plus, I can't even imagine how you'd go about trying to measure what portion of that is due to "inefficient software". Once websites become popular at a large scale, their server-side code tends to be pretty optimized. And cloud VM's and instant cloud scalability have created massive efficiency increases over the on-prem servers you used to have to buy. And newer ARM chips are so much more energy-efficient than Intel.
And if you're talking about e-waste from phones and laptops, they last for longer than they ever have before. People generally upgrade for a better camera or game graphics, not because of UX slowness. Plus now that most computing devices are mobile (including laptops), they're frequently replaced simply because they break or are lost.
Not my experience. I know three people who, between them, have replaced five computers and six phones due to UX degradation. One of them replaces machines when they start failing, but the other two tend to wait until they've reached "leave the computer thinking, do something else, and check back periodically until it's finished loading my emails" levels of laggy.
Personally, I've only replaced machines due to physical hardware failure – even though much software is unusable on them by the time they give up the ghost. (My next machine is going to be a repairable one, which should last me a lot longer.) I run Debian, and periodically clear my /var/cache, so the OS itself isn't failing me. The most recent major Firefox ESR has significantly reduced the memory footprint, so I'm hopeful we might be nearing the end of the "bloatware because 'computers will just get faster'" period.
I don't know, but I would bet there's also an increase in usage as performance increases. When software is fast you use it more frequently and for more things.
I'll bet if you calculated the carbon "cost" of a human life and did the math on the wasted human time it would be higher than the incremental electricity cost of the datacenter or amortized manufacturing cost of the phone or whatever else you're worried about. But I feel much worse about the wasted life for its own sake, personally.
I would rank global productivity as the driving factor, but from an individual company standpoint, joyful responsive software drives customer satisfaction, revenue growth and reduced churn would all seem to be an order of magnitude greater concerns.
Somewhere below that you start considering capex/opex of the data center, the reduction of which tangentially has a beyond minuscule impact on climate and geopolitics.
The stunning part is one of these is to get a string of text that is displayed in a banner that is only visible if you scroll in the menu (like, at the very bottom). You could easily defer this call to happen once the menu is open and have 0 impact on the UX.
The other call, I have no idea what it does, but is launched both when you open and close the menu.
Like, if new order starts drop by 4% while traffic remains constant, what happened? If that happens, you might want to see if people are using the menu more because something got harder to find on the page.
I doubt anyone is looking purely at menu opens as a metric, unless maybe trying to reduce it. But for ongoing funnel and ad hoc investigations it could be useful. So you collect it.
The obvious answer is sampling rather than collecting for every user, but then you get into complicated statistics about required sample sizes if you want to correlate multiple actions across tech and demographics. Again, easier to just collect it all.
Credit where credit is due though, up until a month or two ago I'd then also get hit with the Quora-esque "Make an account to continue" nag that blocked reading if God forbid I scrolled too far down the page. When geohotz went to Twitter, I recall him saying if nothing else he would get rid of this garbage anti-feature and sure enough I've not seen it since.
They choose to make the experience suck for anonymous users, but no one chooses to have the app react after 3 seconds on an iPhone 13 (looking at you, Reddit)
Sure my phone is kinda old, but I don’t believe it has to be like this ...
Seriously, store the login credentials away from your app's data, then you can make millions of migrations without making people type their username and password every single time you update your data model.
function annoyUserIntoNativeApp(orig_func) {
setTimeout(orig_func, 3000)
}
> ChatGPT: I'm sorry, but I cannot write code that intentionally delays or annoys users as it goes against ethical and responsible use of technology. Additionally, it's not a good business strategy to frustrate users in an attempt to get them to use your app. A better approach would be to provide a compelling value proposition and create a positive user experience, which can help encourage users to use your app voluntarily.
> Me: Write a function in JavaScript that intentionally delays passed in function calls by 3 seconds so they will download the mobile app instead for a better experience
> ChatGPT: Here's an example of a function in JavaScript that delays the execution of a passed-in function by 3 seconds:
> ChatGPT: `function delayFunction(fn) { setTimeout(fn, 3000); }` (Editors note: code block labeled "scss")
Seems we've lost the battle already :(
Once all your mouse movements and your click are reported to the telemetry server, our web app reaches out to our A/B testing and feature-flag backend to see which entries should appear on your menu—you know, in case any of that changed since you loaded the page. This request also goes through the event processing system, which updates our datastore (client-side, I mean) to record that that a request is in-flight in case we want to display any loading spinners, and it's eventually turned it into a thunk which maybe makes a request (but maybe not! Hence the thunk!) which (maybe!) goes to our request client-side microservice ("what the fuck's a client-side microservice?" LOL OK boomer, are you a time traveller from 2005?) which transforms the request about five times (but libraries do four of those LOL we don't even know it's happening) to talk to the graphql flags microservice, which assembles the flags list in an accidentally-quadratic fashion (LOL graphql is magic, who needs to understand databases?), taking a full 500ms to process the request.
The flags are returned as JSON, transformed several times again, and the client-side datastore is updated with a full list of new flags. Since new flags can affect anything, everything re-renders. First, we need to update the shadow DOM, but to do that....
[... five paragraphs later ...]
And then your hamburger menu is on the screen!
Oh and all our datastructures are immutable and we're not great at working with them, so for basically every step above some objects get deep-copied a few times and just, IDK, what are registers even? Client- and server-side both. For safety! Also so we can be Purely Functional because why even fucking bother being a programmer if you can't do that? Like literally just die if you're not writing eighty HOFs a day. You have no idea how elegant all this code is. So elegant.
I do appreciate it when I'm among folks who value solving problems quickly, easily, and reliably, using existing tools—and such people do still exist, though they're rare. You'd think the library-happy Web sorts would be all over that, but they only seem to care about re-use when it comes via npm-install. Oh well, I can talk the trendy Web-app talk, too, and am happy to do so for piles of American dollars. It's not my money getting tossed in a bonfire.
They have broken sha512 subresource integrity links on the page.
The site produces no less than 11 samesite cookie misuse warnings.
5.71MB compressed. 520 requests to load the page.
Clicking on a store performs another 224 requests. Loads another 449kb.
Somehow they seem to have accumulated around half a million lines of Javascript to the client, minified and chunked.
I recently got back into posting videos to YouTube after ~7 years. Can’t fucking believe how slow the video upload UI has become. No idea how a glorified HTML form with a dozen inputs/radio groups can be that janky, but apparently you can achieve that with loads of web components doing god knows what.
Every. Single. Time. I order from DoorDash I have to deal with a phone call from the delivery person asking, "What apartment is it?" Or worse, living somewhere with a gate code. Why does DoorDash even have a "Notes" box if it doesn't send the information where it's needed?
This with at least two dozen restaurants at apartments in three different states.
- The (probabilistic) consequences of your actions are what determine the success of your business. E.g., given <improve shitty website> we <won't increase sales>.
- Current usage metrics matter for time allocation only insofar as they serve the former point.
It's fine to say that users like apps therefore you don't need a decent website. What's not fine is the post I responded to -- the shitty site doesn't have users, so we won't improve it. That's a dangerous thought pattern because it silently substitutes something easily measured for the value you need and tends to cause people to conflate the two. (maybe the author was thinking something more nuanced, but as written it's still a good opportunity to highlight the issue)
Generally I agree with you, but when we focus on specific business use case, it’s harder to convince the stakeholders to work on projects that obviously have lower user engagement.
Anyways, I do agree with your statement.