Sorry but this piece comes across as entitled and whiny. It's easy to point out how bloated and terrible most modern large sites are and guffaw in disgust at the counts of xhttp requests and scripts that are loaded in order to provide no user benefit.
But just moaning about it probably won't make the problem go away. Simply rendering text isn't a business-model anymore unfortunately, and publishers are doing everything they can to actually make their content profitable.
Look: I hate the modern web as much as anyone and I always browse with ad-blocking on. But I turn it off for sites that I get real value from, and I pay monthly membership fees to news sites that I believe respect me as a visitor. My way of working isn't super great for me or for publishers (and I doubt most users turn off adblock for sites they value).
I was hoping this article would show some empathy for publishers and why they would start down the road of such user-hostile behavior. A complete piece would paint a vision for how to end the madness with a solution that is acceptable both to publishers and viewers. I don't know what that solution is, but I strongly doubt that just moaning and counting xhttp requests is part of it.
>Simply rendering text isn't a business-model anymore unfortunately, and publishers are doing everything they can to actually make their content profitable.
If they can't come with a business model that works on the web then they're welcome to leave the web and go back to the printing press. The web wasn't made to provide a stable platform for monetizing content, they have literally every other media paradigm ever created for that.
> You're not entitled to their content on whatever terms you decide are fair or not.
Yes I am. I'm entitled to whatever content their server returns in response to my user-agent's request, and I'm entitled to filter and alter that content in any way I choose, including not running javascript and blocking advertising.
If they want to put content behind a paywall, fine - good luck getting anyone to consider their content worth paying for, though. Otherwise, it's fair game. That's the way the web works, and that's the way it's always worked.
I strongly suspect that 80-90% of the bloat and slowness is due to the ad/tracking parts. Yes, there's bloat with modern web/js tooling but even React and Angular (I think the heaviest of the modern bunch) are on the order of hundreds of kbs gzipped over the wire, and the benefit they give is better ux. "Old web" was fast/bare-html but not great for nontrivial ux.
But just moaning about it probably won't make the problem go away. Simply rendering text isn't a business-model anymore unfortunately, and publishers are doing everything they can to actually make their content profitable.
Look: I hate the modern web as much as anyone and I always browse with ad-blocking on. But I turn it off for sites that I get real value from, and I pay monthly membership fees to news sites that I believe respect me as a visitor. My way of working isn't super great for me or for publishers (and I doubt most users turn off adblock for sites they value).
I was hoping this article would show some empathy for publishers and why they would start down the road of such user-hostile behavior. A complete piece would paint a vision for how to end the madness with a solution that is acceptable both to publishers and viewers. I don't know what that solution is, but I strongly doubt that just moaning and counting xhttp requests is part of it.