Nick Heer:
My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten to twenty seconds for a basic news article.
And:
With an internet connection faster than I could have thought possible in the late 1990s, what’s the score now? A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the bullshit web.
This is a tremendous read. I especially loved the take on AMP. Read it all the way to the end. Exceptional writing.
great read.
The bulls**t is right, but I did not experience anything he talked about. For example, when I clicked on that CNN link, it came up in 1, maybe 2 seconds.
Also, the web of the modem days went bankrupt. You have two options, deal with bullshit or pay cold hard cash. Some folks, like me, may be willing to pay cold hard cash for it, but not enough people to keep those websites up and running as ongoing concerns (see the affiliate revenue issue below). Let’s lay out the tradeoffs, pluses and minuses, honestly. Sites like Politico and CNN have reporters to pay and servers to run. That bulls**t is part of what pays for it.