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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-inc

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.

jhanoncomm 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        "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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
> 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.
- 123yawaworht456 3y ago
  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.
- II2II 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
emseetech 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    People did, in fact, embed games on MySpace, mostly using Flash if I recall correctly.
zozbot234 3y ago
> 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).
- Cacti 3y ago
  Voice, video, realtime interaction, a devoted user base, an incredible amount of money…
  - a_bored_husky 3y ago
    Discourse, not Discord.
    - Cacti 3y ago
      whoopsie. thanks.
  - zelphirkalt 3y ago
    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.
    - deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- mardifoufs 3y ago
  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.
yawaramin 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  Isn't that 'worse is better' philosophy?
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    I think it's rather a "performance is more important than functionality" philosophy.
    - yawaramin 3y ago
      In the case of the devices we're talking about, performance is effectively functionality.
      - LoganDark 3y ago
        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 3y ago
        The most performant site is a blank page.
        fuzzfactor 3y ago
        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.
Telemakhos 3y ago
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 3y ago
  It shouldn't be a PDF because they don't reflow text, especially important for phones
  - literallycancer 3y ago
    Make 2 pdfs.
    - eviks 3y ago
      there are more than 2 screen widths
bombcar 3y ago
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.
freddie_mercury 3y ago
> 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.
- keybored 3y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 !
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  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.
- lozenge 3y ago
  "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.
andai 3y ago
Could you elaborate on features and polish, i.e. give some specific examples?
- andai 2y ago
  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...
qingcharles 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 :(

jhanoncomm 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      "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 3y ago
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 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago

> 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.

123yawaworht456 3y ago
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.
II2II 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.

emseetech 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  People did, in fact, embed games on MySpace, mostly using Flash if I recall correctly.

zozbot234 3y ago

> 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).

Cacti 3y ago
Voice, video, realtime interaction, a devoted user base, an incredible amount of money…
- a_bored_husky 3y ago
  Discourse, not Discord.
  - Cacti 3y ago
    whoopsie. thanks.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mardifoufs 3y ago
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.

yawaramin 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
Isn't that 'worse is better' philosophy?
- LoganDark 3y ago
  I think it's rather a "performance is more important than functionality" philosophy.
  - yawaramin 3y ago
    In the case of the devices we're talking about, performance is effectively functionality.
    - LoganDark 3y ago
      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 3y ago
      The most performant site is a blank page.
      - fuzzfactor 3y ago
        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.

Telemakhos 3y ago

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 3y ago
It shouldn't be a PDF because they don't reflow text, especially important for phones
- literallycancer 3y ago
  Make 2 pdfs.
  - eviks 3y ago
    there are more than 2 screen widths

bombcar 3y ago

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.

freddie_mercury 3y ago

> 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.

keybored 3y ago
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 2y ago
  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 !
CaptainFever 3y ago
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.
lozenge 3y ago
"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.

andai 3y ago

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

andai 2y ago
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...

qingcharles 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 2y ago
  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 :(