It's called "bloat". Maybe "selling out". To many hands on deck. VC's want profitability.
It resolves itself usually. Sometimes.
Websites get bloated over time. Difficult to read. Slow to load. Messy UI. Runaway code. Ads everywhere. People stop visiting. Less bloated alternatives appear.
Slashdot ... MySpace ... been there done that.
Reddit, Imgur .. drifting slowly but surely towards bloat.
Mobile apps suffer too. To a lesser extent due to limited screen space. Poorly designed apps, non-native apps, heavy Javascript frameworks, ad popups etc.
Even worse, when a mobile developer decides to build a simple website for the first time.
Install Mercurial, Vagrant, Bower, NPM, Grunt, Mongo, Express, Mongoose, Passport, Angular .. update everything .. cache clean everything .. check your environment settings .. mess around with Heroku .. create a Docker image for easy deployment. Spin up a virtual machine.
Now hand off that 5 page website to someone else when the project is complete. They'll add bloat to bloat.
Better or worse?
The web is old. We're focused on apps. Eventually we'll move back to the web and clean things up.
This morning I saw an ad for a Magic the Gathering game in my feed. They had been testing Reddit placeholder messages before so I knew it was a matter of time, but damn did that highlight that I REALLY hate feed-based ads.
Unfortunately, I'm sure it is the new reality. My main issue is that over time the feed gets "curated" in a way that drives more and more ad clicks vs. the view I want.
Imgur is already bloated. As for reddit, I'm curious about what makes you think they're drifting towards bloating. They use JavaScript (replying to a comment creates a new textarea), AJAX (posting a comment), WebSockets (real-time updates of comment timestamps), modals (sign up), but they do this in a very moderate way and the result is really robust. It seems to me that they perfectly know the power of all these technologies but have a very strong QA which doesn't let a single shit get pushed in prod.
More of a prediction at this point ... that $50 million in VC has been pushing them towards possible bloat. Not so much on the tech side, but on the advertising and monetization side.
Perhaps the recent resignations have something to do with a pushback against that? Internal bloat will eventually show itself!
It resolves itself usually. Sometimes.
Websites get bloated over time. Difficult to read. Slow to load. Messy UI. Runaway code. Ads everywhere. People stop visiting. Less bloated alternatives appear.
Slashdot ... MySpace ... been there done that. Reddit, Imgur .. drifting slowly but surely towards bloat.
Mobile apps suffer too. To a lesser extent due to limited screen space. Poorly designed apps, non-native apps, heavy Javascript frameworks, ad popups etc.
Even worse, when a mobile developer decides to build a simple website for the first time.
Install Mercurial, Vagrant, Bower, NPM, Grunt, Mongo, Express, Mongoose, Passport, Angular .. update everything .. cache clean everything .. check your environment settings .. mess around with Heroku .. create a Docker image for easy deployment. Spin up a virtual machine.
Now hand off that 5 page website to someone else when the project is complete. They'll add bloat to bloat.
Better or worse?
The web is old. We're focused on apps. Eventually we'll move back to the web and clean things up.