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Comment by anon_cow1111 | Hacker News Reader

This is a nice project, but please don't hit people with 100+ mbs of gif images without a warning

It's a page about animations, so it's obviously going to be more media heavy than your average page. And the average random website is decently large anyway.

NYT is 11mb, wapo is 22, scrolling down once on reddit is like 40mb.

100 and something mb doesn't warrant pre-warning for a page specifically promising animations.

If the videos were mp4/webm, the whole page would be about 1/10th the size. Gif format was never intended for this type of use. (and yes, thanks for pointing out several other horribly bloated websites, luckily browsing with JS disabled cuts them down to a few mb at most like they should be)

I was worried about my blog entries being too heavy. I kept them under 3MiB each.

Then I made one where I realised it really needed some rather big videos for illustration. It ended up being 43MiB and... After thinking about it for a while I decided that was fine. The few people interested in my work are unlikely to even notice the download.

What are you browsing on, a blackberry bold?

Animation doesn't have to imply huge. The animations on this page could be done with a few kilobytes of GL shader.

It should be tagged like "56k killer" like the good old days!

Hi! I'm the creator of the site. Thanks for pointing this out! The number of animations has grown over time, and I didn't realize how big the size has gotten. Do you have an idea in mind for how you'd like the site to behave? E.g., static images that play when you click/tap on them? Sections that are hidden until you expand them? Other ideas? Thanks!

134 MB to be exact.

How about you Americans stop bending over for monopolies that make you worry about such trivial things in 2023?

I think this might be less of an issue for HN browsing American nerds (who likely have great Internet connections) and more of an issue for people in developing countries or with poor network infrastructure.

I mean, you can stream netflix in rural Cambodia and not worry about data limits so I'm not so sure. Of course someone will be able to name somewhere this is a concern, but then you should be running browser extensions to manage media loading.

Actually it's the reverse of the above nowadays, many third world countries have cheaper, faster internet than much of the US.

I love the cynicism, but if we’re looking at Median speed, us is still among the best - 11th for broadband, 26th for mobile. Punching below its weight class, for sure, but not exactly worse than developing countries. The only exceptions are Thailand, Hungary, and Romania IMO - props to them!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_In...

I'd just like to politely point out that Hungary is absolutely miles away from being a developing country, as is Romania, and these days Thailand doesn't even count either for the most part.

Very fair! I guess I’d consider them somewhat “third world”, though obviously only in the “not western Europe, the commonwealth, the US, or east Asia”. Which isn’t exactly a great metric but it’s what a lot of Americans mean by that term lol

I mean, a brunch in Budapest will set you back more than Berlin, the coffee is the same price as London etc.

It's not like, ex eastern bloc in the 90s.

Some travel to update your view on the world is in order my friend.

The only places without great infrastructure in 2023 are those being bombed.

I might sound like an entitled westerner but I don't think I'd even open a web browser and just click around on the internet if I had a capped or billed internet connection. At least not with auto-downloading content like images and video enabled.

I keep hearing this argument, and still not sure which countries people are referring to. Maybe rural areas of US/Canada or other large countries? Just curious about the real affected number of people.

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