alt Hacker News"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data."
Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not truly relevant to the story)
News sites are almost like lyric sites or recipe sites in this regard. The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit.
Replies
For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.
I think your point about one-off visitors is key. If most traffic is coming from search/social, there's no real incentive to build a clean, loyal-reader experience
> The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit.
They operate a bit like restaurants in tourist areas
They probably assume a regular would log in.
It depends. Some sites have a soft, client-side paywall and others have a hard, server-side paywall. NYT has the latter, so you can't get the full article text with JS blocked.
I'd say that very much ties into the point of the article. The fact that turning off a major component of your browser significantly improves the experience is damning. That means they put tremendous effort (i.e. money) into deliberately making their readers' experience worse.
> "and 49 megabytes of data"
This can go into "Things Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than" https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3175629 - comments from 2011 when the Yahoo.com homepage was ~220Kb
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843140 - comments from 2020