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Comment by attah_ | Hacker News Reader

Cool tech, but i feel that for all even remotely modern connection types placeholders like this are obsolete and do nothing but slow down showing the real thing.

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And this is why everything is slow and terrible. Because us developers use fast machines on fast connections, and assume everyone else does.

Travel to some far flung parts of the world, and see if your hypothesis holds true.

If I was in a far flung part of the world I wouldn’t be perusing content rich bandwidth intensive websites.

I’d be smoking a cig sitting on a worn mattress in the highest floor of an abandoned apartment building typing on a late 90s ThinkPad, negotiating prices on stolen credit card lists through encrypted IRC channels and moving illicit files on SSH servers based in foreign countries.

I'm in a far flung part of the world and a lot of my time is spent in very normal places like the AWS console, not doing any of those cool and dangerous sounding things.

Maybe you haven’t been flung far enough.

When you go full lain...

Well, yes and no. There is lots of waste for sure, but this is really just not warranted. Honestly i'm not sure it ever was. Even 15-20 years ago actual pictures loaded just fine. And don't get me started on text placeholders..

I'm not really sure that sentiment applies here. People on slow or unreliable connections probably aren't going to rejoice that they get to see blobs of color for a while until the full images load, all for the cost of waiting longer for the full images and loading more total data at the end of the ordeal.

> all for the cost of waiting longer for the full images and loading more total data at the end of the ordeal.

Thumbhash is tiny (like, 28 bytes base64) and can be embedded in the html itself

Replacing all your CSS class names by one or two letter names would save multiple times this amount even on tiny websites, but I'm not seeing nobody doing this

CSS class names probably don't benefit much unless you're on such low end hardware that you're worried about client gzip costs (and at some point we have to determine some reasonable floor to client capabilities). These embedded thumbnails would presumably be essentially incompressible.

When Facebook did it years ago (plus their slim version of the web page) they mentioned India as one important use case. Huge country, a lot of people, but not even remotely a "modern connection". Also other "remote" countries like Australia have worse network performance. Of course you could say you don't care about APAC, but that's not how websites should be build.

My modern connection is a mobile network where speed very much comes and goes depending on where I am.

There's nothing obsolete about phones on mobile networks.

Until you don't have that connection somewhere.. Plus it will still work when your CDN / image processing server is having troubles.

One pervasive source of slow connections, even in well-developed places, is mobile devices as they travel in a car or public transit.

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