The Bullshit Web
I&#x27;ve said this before, but it bears repeating:<p>Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That&#x27;s lower than the &quot;average&quot; news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that&#x27;s more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb.<p>I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long, but the page was 5.9mb. That&#x27;s about 4kb per word without including the gateway (which is required if you&#x27;re not using social media). Including the gateway, that&#x27;s about 8kb per word, which is actually about the size of the actual content of the article itself.<p>So all told, to read just one article from the New York Times, I had to download the equivalent of ten copies of Moby Dick. That&#x27;s about 4,600 pages. That&#x27;s approaching the entirety of George R.R. Martin&#x27;s A Song of Ice and Fire, without appendices.<p>If I check the NY Times just 4 times a day and read three articles each time, I&#x27;m downloading 100mb worth of stuff (83 Moby-Dicks) to read 72kb worth of plaintext.<p>Even ignoring first-principles ecological conservatism, that&#x27;s just insanely inefficient and wasteful, regardless of how inexpensive bandwidth and computing power are in the west.<p>EDIT: I wrote a longer write-up on this a while ago on a personal blog, but don&#x27;t want it to be hugged to death:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;txti.es&#x2F;theneedforplaintext" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;txti.es&#x2F;theneedforplaintext</a>