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[–] 54 points 1 year ago (7 children)

There's 2 separate universes here.

Devs and tech companies care only for UX, convenience, and reduced friction to use any service. They would put their granny's home address and SSN in the headers if it made a page load 10ms faster. Their incentives are all short-sighted to hit the next goal to outcompete other devs/companies and ship their end of history killer app that will solve all problems - and that will still get bloated and enshittified within 18 months.

Then there's us, a subset of rational people educated about how much data gets transmitted, who are horrified by the general state of being online, and are hard to impress when it comes to more than just saying "privacy!" when promoting anything at all.

IMO, we have to DIY and cobble together so much of our own protection, we're closer to artists that live a strange life that few people understand, seems weird from the outside, but we love for the peace of mind. Which is not enough to be any appreciable segment of the market to move the needle on any product worth real money.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    They would put their granny's home address and SSN in the headers if it made a page load 10ms faster.

    Have they ever considered that pages would load faster if they didn't include 20MB of JavaScript?

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Just yesterday I was on a news website. I wanted to support it and the author of the piece so I opened a clean session of firefox. No extensions or blocking of any kind.

    The "initial" payload (i.e. after I lost patience approximately 30s after initial page load and decided to call a number) was 14.79MB transferred. But the traffic never stopped. In the network view you could see the browser continually running ad auctions and about every 15s the ads on the page would cycle. The combination of auctions and ads on my screen kept that tab fully occupied at 25-40% of my CPU. Firefox self-reported the tab as taking over 400MB of RAM.

    This was so egregious that I had to run one simple test. I set my DNS on my desktop to my PiHole and re-ran my experiment.

    Initial payload went from almost 14.79 -> 4.00MB (much of which was fonts and oversized images to preview other articles). And the page took 1/4 the RAM and almost no CPU anymore.

    Modern web is dogshit.

    This was the website in question. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/welcomefest-dispatch-centrism-abundance/

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Yes, but the manager with a shitty MBA doesn't care about overall company appearance of performance, as long as their department looks good on paper. And they figured that would be easier by using four different external libraries, and then let another department figure out the rest.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    Yeah, this is so fucked up ! When you archive reddit pages, those are over 20 fucking MB for just a conversation ! That's fucking insane...

    I can reduce it to less than 500KB with alternative frontends, but still... This makes absolutely no sense and I'm scared to find out what they are hiding in between all those lines of code !

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    IMO, we have to DIY and cobble together so much of our own protection, we’re closer to artists that live a strange life that few people understand, seems weird from the outside, but we love for the peace of mind.

    That's beautiful

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