Nina Kalinina
nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt
One day, there was a family riding next to me in a bus. The mother chastised her kids for smartphone habits: "it's been only a week since the beginning of the billing period, and you've spent 3GB of traffic already!"
I wanted to apologise to her and to her children on behalf of all the BigTech and modern IT industry so badly.
I also felt immensely sad for the internet reality we live in. Twenty years ago I would spend my allowance on buying a 5MB dial-up access card, and that would be enough for a day of happy browsing, or a few days of ICQ. Nowadays, I wouldn't be able to even load Discord browser app with that much of traffic.
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Ret the Folf
ret@furry.engineer@nina_kali_nina @evv42 honestly though the people to be upset at are the mobile networks and ISPs. Profiteering gluttons.
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Charlotte 🦝 
charlotte
@ret @nina_kali_nina @evv42 it is wrong of web developers to treat traffic as something that is free, however
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Ret the Folf
ret@furry.engineer@charlotte @evv42 @nina_kali_nina agree generally, but I think it’s a little bit unfair to say “oh we got by on 5MB and it was fine” - while ignoring the massive improvements in usability, accessibility, capabilities, etc.
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Charlotte 🦝
charlotte
@ret @evv42 @nina_kali_nina not really. website usability is at an all time low (when was the last time you visited a website for the first time without being inundated by popups? even one is too much), and while it is now easier to make your website look the way you want it to without hurting accessibility. Increased accessibility is also kind of debatable, because the primary thing that improved is assistive technologies, while the web piled on more and more layers of issues that the assistive technologies had to work around
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Ret the Folf
ret@furry.engineer@charlotte hmm. Not sure I remember the popup situation being much better on the early 2000s web to be honest!
Maybe I used the wrong word when I said accessible - I really meant from a perspective of “how easy it was for new users to get into” but I take your point about the march of web technologies hindering accessibility in the assistive technology sense.
I would say, back on the “data volume” part - I’m sure a very, very tiny percentage of the 3GB referenced in OP’s original post was code (bloated web apps or otherwise) or text content (messages). The vast majority will be multimedia - video and images.
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@ret yeah fair, but the same especially applies to multimedia. Especially with codecs like jpeg xl (whenever browsers support it 
), opus, and av1 you can have completely reasonable quality for media at a fraction of the size
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Nina Kalinina
nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt@ret @charlotte I actually doubt it was all media. 🤔 I think it'll be interesting to turn off image/video loading and see how much traffic stuff will consume.
But also: it can be media but not the one you need. Multi-megabyte splash images with no utility are ubiquitous
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Nina Kalinina
nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt@ret @charlotte @evv42 good old HTML3 was often more accessible than whatever this *shrugs while looking at JS UI toolkits* is, no?
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