[bluquark]

Dan's point about being aware of the different levels of inequality in the world is something I strongly agree with, but that should also include the middle-income countries, especially in Latin America and Southeast Asia. For example, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in the single-digit GBs, and a RAM/CPU profile resembling a decade-old US flagship. That's good enough to use Discourse at all, but the experience will probably be on the unpleasantly slow side. I believe it's primarily this category of user that accounts for Dan's observation that incremental improvements in CPU/RAM/disk measurably improve engagement.

As for users with the lowest-end devices like the Itel P32, Dan's chart seems to prove that no amount of incremental optimization would benefit them. The only thing that might is a wholesale different client architecture that sacrifices features and polish to provide the slimmest code possible. That is, an alternate "lite/basic" mode. Unfortunately, this style of approach has rarely proved successful: the empathy problem returns in a different guise, as US-based developers often make the wrong decisions on which features/polish are essential to keep versus discarded for performance reasons.

[zozbot234]

> That's good enough to use Discourse at all, but the experience will probably be on the unpleasantly slow side. ... an alternate "lite/basic" mode

Why does this need to be the "alternate" choice though? What does current Discourse provide that e.g. PhpBB or the DLang forum do not? (Other than mobile friendly design, which in a sane world shouldn't involve more than a few tweaks to a "responsive" CSS stylesheet).

[mardifoufs]

I like the scroll view in discourse. Makes it super easy to follow a thread. The subthreads and replies are also easier to use. The search is better, the ability to upvote makes it better for some use cases, and in general phpbb is a mess in terms of actually being able to see what's useful and what threads are relevant.

I think flipping the question makes more sense, why do you think some forums switched to or started using discourse instead of just using phpbb? I can guarantee you that it's not just to follow a fad or whatever, most niche or support forums don't care about that.

[ParetoOptimal]

I do think trendiness and modern feeling uis are requirements for most forums these days from most perspectives.

I say this as someone that frequently uses and enjoys both rue brutalist design of a text web browser and the emacs mastodon client.

[BlueTemplar]

Discourse still offers a worse experience than phpBB though, even if you use a fast device.

[AJ007]

I was thinking about this when I saw this post earlier today.

Why shouldn't the default be: does this website work in Lynx? I think that's a damn good baseline.

And in response to the other parent post, on a (almost) new iPhone, both news sites & Twitter continuously crash and reload for me. I'm not sure what the state of these other popular sites are because I don't use them.

[Cacti]

Voice, video, realtime interaction, a devoted user base, an incredible amount of money…

[zelphirkalt]

What do you mean by voice and video? Why would I want to have voice in a forum? I think that would be akin to receiving voice messages in messengers. Or do you mean, that for these kinds of things a widget can be displayed? That certainly is possible in old style forums. It is just HTML, an embed code away.

[a_bored_husky]

Discourse, not Discord.

[Cacti]

whoopsie. thanks.

[freddie_mercury]

> For example, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in the single-digit GBs

I live in a poor Southeast Asian country.

People with small data plans don't use data from efficient websites, they use wifi which is omnipresent.

30GB of data on a monthly plan is $3.64. Which is about 4-6 hours of minimum wage (minimum wage is lower in agricultural areas).

But more to the point, people don't use data profligately like in the West. Every single cafe, restaurant, supermarket, and mall has free wifi. Most people ask for the wifi password before they ask for the menu.

I've never seen or heard anyone talk about a website using up their data too fast.

It honestly sounds like a made up concern from people who've never actually lived in a developing country.

People here run out of data from watching videos on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Not from website bloat.

[jcagalawan]

> Every single cafe, restaurant, supermarket, and mall has free wifi.

I live in a major city in the Philippines, and free WiFi is becoming more of a rarity nowadays. Not even Starbucks and other big chain restaurants, malls, and cafes offer WiFi anymore because of how widely available data is. They expect you to bring your own data and tether if you want to browse or do some work.

In more rural areas, WiFi is definitely not widely available. On the rare chance it’s even offered, it’s usually “piso WiFi” paid by the minute.

[inemesitaffia]

I live in one. You're talking nonsense.

That 30GB plan is more than some people with phones earn here

[CaptainFever]

Thank you for the first hand experience anecdote!

I think one way for first world country citizens to empathise with this is how people behave when on roaming data plans during overseas trips. One does keep to public WiFi as much as possible and keep mobile data usage to a minimum or for emergency purposes.

[kevincox]

> I've never seen or heard anyone talk about a website using up their data too fast.

Is this because the website usage doesn't add up or because they don't have the tools to track which sites are using how much data?

[keybored]

I mean not using Data Plan here in Northern Europe was me 11 years ago… and me using it sparingly because video or songs would blow through the Data Plan instantly was me eight years ago.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, I still remember when I started massively using the cellular Web : at the time it cost 1024€/Go, which I found to be cheap !

[lannisterstark]

eh, idk. This is your anecdotal experience, there are others (like me) who have different ones

>It honestly sounds like a made up concern from people who've never actually lived in a developing country.

I once loaded a site that loaded approx 324mb "Super resolution" image (I knew it was high res, but I thought it was like 30-40 mb at best). Took care of 1/3rd of my monthly data in a single page load.

[aembleton]

A useful feature of uBlockOrigin is being able to block all media elements larger than a given amount such as 50KB. Wish I could set it to only do this on mobile networks and let wifi stay unlimited.

[lozenge]

"It honestly sounds like a made up concern from people who've never actually lived in a developing country."

You mean, the one developing country you live in.

You are also missing the full spectrum of users. People don't just browse the web for fun. They look for important information like health or finance information, they might not want to do that in a public place or they might not be able to put it off for when they next have wifi.

If you are building an e commerce website it might not matter, but you could be building a news site, or any number of other things.

[jhanoncomm]

If all the sites tot more efficient it may also increase longevity of laptops and PCs where unsavvy people might just “need a new computer it is getting slow”.

Also applies to bloatware shipped with computers. To the point where I was offered a $50 “tune up” to a new laptop I purchased recently. Imagine a new car dealer offered you that!

[genewitch]

I worked at a now-defunct electronics store (not fry's in this instance) in the early 2000s that offered this "tune-up" - it was to remove the stuff that HP and Dell got paid to pre-install, and to fully update windows and whatever else.

Remove the mcafee nuisance popups and any browser "addons" that were badged/branded. and IIRC we charged more than $50 for that service back then.

[fbdab103]

For the performance boost it could offer the unsavy user stuck on a HDD, it was probably worth it to many. Gross to be the middleman, but it is what it is.

[genewitch]

Another computer shop i worked in charged $90 for virus removal, but we also eventually made it policy to just reformat/reimage the drive and remove all the crap and fully update the OS. Prior to that the policy was "remove viruses, remove crapware, update OS", but we had a few customers that had machines with 30,000 viruses. I forget what the record was, but it was way up there in count. Trying to clean those machines had a marginal failure rate, enough that it was costing the owner money to have us repeatedly clean them without payment.

No one wants to tell a customer that they need to find better adult content sites, and that we won't be cleaning their machines without payment anymore!

[lukan]

"just reformat/reimage the drive and remove all the crap"

And that is not more work?

It was usually the way I did it, too. But this requires checking with the owner what apps are important, saved preferences, where are the important files stored (they never know) etc.

[teamonkey]

What’s the financial incentive in that? Manufacturers ideally want you to buy a whole new device every year, they don’t want you repairing or extending the life.

[gxs]

Some of these sites are un-fucking-bearable on my gen old iPhone.

And the if I’m in a place with a shitty signal, forget about it, this problem is 10 times worse.

I’m not even talking about the cluttered UI where only a third of the page is visible because of frozen headers and ads, I’m talking about the size of the websites themselves that are built by people who throw shit against the wall until it looks like whatever design document they were given. A website that would have already been bloated had it been built correctly that then becomes unusable on a slow internet connection, forget slow hardware.

All that is to say, I can’t imagine what it must be like to use the internet under the circumstances in which you described.

I can only hope these people use localized sites built for their bandwidth and devices and don’t have to interact with the bloated crap we deal with.

[ryandrake]

I really wish all software developers had to have 10 year old phones and computers and a slow 3G connection as their daily drivers. It might at the very least give them some empathy about how hard it is to use their software on an underspec machine.

[goalieca]

> For example, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in the single-digit GBs, and a RAM/CPU profile resembling a decade-old US flagship

I’m in Canada and have a single digit plan and I just upgraded from an almost decade old flagship. Most websites are torture.

[II2II]

I'm in Canada and have a triple-digit plan, in MBs. It's for emergency use only. It would be nice if something as simple as checking on power outages didn't chew up a good portion of the data plan.

[doubled112]

I had a 200MB plan for $35/month until early 2022. It was an old Koodo plan.

I never used it. I don't do a lot. WiFi at home, drive to work, WiFi at work, drive to home.

Travelling with the kids I've found the new plan makes life easier.

[II2II]

Yeah, different people need different things out of their phones. Yet the point remains that stingy data plans still exist in developed countries. Even though people may have better devices than those mentioned in the article (it is easier to justify a one-time expense than a recurring one), there are people who are stuck with them for various reasons. Affordability is definitely one of the reasons.

Even so, we should avoid pigeonholing those who have limited access to data as poor people. There are other reasons.

[123yawaworht456]

in mid 00's, I had ADSL with iirc ≈300 MB included in the monthly payment, with an extremely predatory rate over the limit. I used to stretch it for 3 weeks out of a month browsing with images disabled (and bulk of my bandwidth spent on Warcraft 3).

that would last for a few hours of lightweight (not youtube/images/etc) browsing now.

[emseetech]

> an alternate "lite/basic" mode.

In another world this mode dominated UI/UX design and development and the result was beautiful and efficient. Where design more resembles a haiku than an unedited novel.

We don't get to live in that world, but it's not hard to imagine.

[bee_rider]

I think it is sort of hard to imagine; a world populated mostly by humans that appreciate that sort of simplicity is pretty different!

If we had modern computers in 200X, we wouldn’t just have music on our myspaces, we’d put whole games there I bet.

[csande17]

People did, in fact, embed games on MySpace, mostly using Flash if I recall correctly.

[Telemakhos]

It's not even just the middle-income countries—I have an iPhone 13, so only three years old, on a US wifi connection with high speed broadband, and it can't handle the glitzy bloat of the prospectus for one of my ETFs. I don't understand why a prospectus shouldn't just be a PDF anyway, but it baffles me that someone would put so much bloated design into a prospectus that a recent phone can't handle it.

[eviks]

It shouldn't be a PDF because they don't reflow text, especially important for phones

[literallycancer]

Make 2 pdfs.

[eviks]

there are more than 2 screen widths

[yawaramin]

> The only thing that might is a wholesale different client architecture that sacrifices features and polish to provide the slimmest code possible. That is, an alternate "lite/basic" mode. Unfortunately, this style of approach has rarely proved successful

But it is gaining popularity with the unexpected rise of htmx and its 'simpler is better even if it's slightly worse' philosophy.

[golergka]

Isn't that 'worse is better' philosophy?

[LoganDark]

I think it's rather a "performance is more important than functionality" philosophy.

[yawaramin]

In the case of the devices we're talking about, performance is effectively functionality.

[LoganDark]

My point exactly. By making your website fast and light, you make it easier and more pleasant to use. HTMX has a limited set of actions that it supports, so it can't do everything that people typically want. It can do more than enough though. (remember websites that actually used the `<form>` element?)

[lukan]

The most performant site is a blank page.

[fuzzfactor]

Astute observation.

It should be easy to use this as a "north star" and your only job is to not screw it up hardly at all.

Some people are just worse screw-ups than others.

[sussmannbaka]

Good news for bloated JS SPAs, since that is often what they look like :)

[qingcharles]

These phones aren't just in the Developing World, though. This is a USA problem too.

I work with parolees and they get the free "Lifeline" phones the federal govt pays for. You can get one for free on any street corner in the poor 'hoods of the USA. They are the cheapest lowest spec Android phones with 15GB data/month. That data is burned up by day 3 due to huge Web payloads and then the user can't fill out forms he needs for jobs/welfare and can't navigate anywhere as he can't load Maps.

[BehindBlueEyes]

I’m curious how quickly the data would be used up if only using it for the intended forms/jobs/welfare. I wouldn’t be surprised if the data lasted barely any longuer due to bloat.

[qingcharles]

When I had one of these the data only lasted me 4 days. I didn't even purposely watch any videos, but I did read a lot of news articles and many "magazine" style sites have huge video payloads that load (and sometimes play) in the background if you're not running something like uBlock. I found some sites with 250MB home pages :(

[bombcar]

Most of those users have the advantage of not using English - and so there are often sites in their native language that cater to lower power devices.

But if you’re in that middle world country AND your official language is English, you’re gonna have a hell of a slow time.

[andai]

Could you elaborate on features and polish, i.e. give some specific examples?

[andai]

What I meant was, I'm pretty sure most of what is considered features and polish today would greatly improve my experience if it were removed...