[kbenson]

I wonder if one of the reasons we've seen a big push towards systems like this is because it does make the website faster, but in a way that's one step removed than we often consider it, or by a slightly different metric.

What if instead of client side load time, what's also being looked at is load time per finite server side compute resource? By dumbing down the server side to graphql JSON delivery + static JS, maybe that allows them to serve that specific need faster per 10k servers or something, and having to do the full page composition under heavy load server side just doesn't scale as well?

[bo1024]

I wonder how much electricity Twitter is saving by running the scripts on their users' machines instead...

[kbenson]

I mean, yes. That's what I was getting at. It's cheaper to offload your compute to your users. It's probably much cheaper to offload a massive amount of compute onto billions of users.

They'll keep doing it until they're penalized in some fashion for doing so, if it's cheaper.