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by araes 881 days ago
The websites are also written badly, and appear to optimize being written badly, because of their lack of goal alignment with users.

If you do a View Source on Reuters.com main landing page, it's script file is a single line that's 1,300,000 characters long. And every time you land on a page it tries to dump 1,300,000 characters of script on you (on top of the multi-MB videos it auto-loads) [and the pop-ups]

Most major corporate websites are that way. All written by algorithms with massive JS downloads and huge 64bit hash keys on every <div>. Tracking 64bit click numbers on each element and dumping all the calculation on the user.

1 comments

You didn't ask for it but might find it useful: https://neuters.de
Thanks. That's a cool site I had no idea existed. Frankly, most major news websites should offer this as a normal alternative. The news browsing experience would be so superior in many ways.
Serves a somewhat different target but yes. Other one is a proxy, this one is made by NPR.