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Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

The real tragedy:

> In fact, the YouTube app is zippier because fewer connections are made to ad URLs in the first place.

I swear on LG TV that webOS runs at a smooth 60 FPS when it's not connected to Wi-Fi and slows down as soon as it phones home for whatever telemetry and ads LG intend to serve me...

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For LG TVs, if you set the region to "Other," it completely disables all the ads, recommended content, and telemetry [1], presumably because they can't keep track of all the changing laws for every nation on earth.

In my experience, there was a noticable performance improvement as well. Bootup times alone are probably 2x-3x faster.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/comments/1571djx/guide_how_t...

Great link, thanks.

In a previous role I was tasked with increasing the lighthouse/pagespeed score across some web properties. After some iterations and very little improvements we would be asked what else we could do. Did we need to speed up the backend? Could we lower latency, etc…

The solution: I set up a query param that would disable google tag manager. All of the crazy tracking and telemetry stuff we didn't control was the biggest issue.

Those analystic spend most of its time trying to tell bots apart from real browsers. This is basically an arm race.

I am not sure who is to blame, but I guess there is no way we can get the simple web we loved back.

Connecting smart TVs to the internet is always a net negative.

You're not imagining it! The ads slow down webOS a lot, and blocking them with pi-hole made my TV much more usable. I highly recommend setting up pi-hole or similar, and blocking all the LG domains it tries to hit.

I commented about it a while back here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34374725

This shows how little they care, or poor engineering, or both.

Failing all engineering effort, they could have use a beefer CPU...

So they can run more ads, negating the performance boost. The answer isn’t simply throw more cpu at the problem.

I’ve never connected my c2 to the internet and it’s great.

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