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> It is so, so easy, to be living and working in big cities like Toronto (me), SF (a bunch of you), NY, Chicago, et cetera, and truly forget the context of the absolutely awful experience a lot of people have online outside of these urban epicentres.

To be fair, many urban companies are designing for urban and suburban users. Your advanced analytics dashboard product is not for Cletus in rural Alabama.

If 30% of your target users don't have broadband, then you should design with that in mind. If 0.01% of your users don't have broadband, then you should ignore them.

If you make your site completely unusable for 30% of people, no matter how many try to use it, they'll end up making up a miniscule portion of your user base, which you'll then use as justification for ignoring them.

Which can be ok. There's no ethical duty to make websites for literally everyone.

Accessibility is a different issue of course, but to illustrate my point: I have never translated my websites to Chinese, making them unusable for 1/7th of the world population. I don't think it's necessarily a failure on my part.

Well, yes, you didn’t communicate it in Chinese. But did you make the text easily machine identifiable? Was the source language indicated? That would allow their browser to offer the ability to translate.

You didn’t intend it for a blind audience, but they’re certainly capable of reading the text. Did you avoid making the text actively toxic to screen readers?

Many of the whiz bang features on new sites, ostensibly because “users want features!”, hinder even this functionality. It’s fair to criticize this as a regression.

I use a browser extension that lets me click links and buttons from the keyboard. The more bleeding edge they make the sites, the less I can use this feature. That’s not an improvement.

It's not worth it to gain 30% more customers by spending 10x the original development time micro-optimizing everything.

But it would be better to gain that 30% of customers by not doing a shit job in the first place. This was the point of the presentation. Not doing a shit job doesn't take that much more effort.

A really important addition to this would be: it has to have been from the start.

The issue is that so many projects have not been designed with these ideas from the outset, that it indeed usually does take a mammoth amount of re-engineering and dev time to make these kinds of changes and optimizations after the fact.

Which is exactly why I cringe - often visibly - at any suggestion that a duct-tape-and-bubble-gum "MVP" is in any way/shape/form acceptable. That "prototype" will end up being the final product because dev teams have a tendency to accumulate technical debt like gangbusters.

To continue with the mediocre carpentry analogies floating around: a (competent) carpenter doesn't build a sturdy table by first building a shitty table and reinforcing it later.

I’m going to take a bigger view of this and you can say it’s “rather convenient”, but I’m not concerned about the experiences of a group of our society that is the biggest resource drag. I’ve had it with rural inhabitants. We already subsidize the shit out of their lifestyle, and now we’re expected to accommodate their Luddite-centric tech access? We need fewer people on the outskirts and more people in cities. The fucking planet is dying.

We should be incentiving people to live closer, not spending 90% of our time on them.

The "fucking planet is dying" because big corporations in their big-city HQs are strangling it to death in the name of short-term profits. Rural areas don't (typically) have the sheer abundance of smokestacks and cars and refrigerators and spray cans Swiss-cheesing the ozone layer. They're certainly not helping by any means (agriculture-driven deforestation is certainly a problem, but not really one in the US, at least not anymore), but that pales in comparison to urban pollution.

But sure, go ahead and blame the dirty country folk for not being able to reliably access your shittily-designed-and-implemented website. God forbid there are people who don't feel like breathing smog all day and existing in perpetual abject misery.

Do we actually care about these users? Are they going to buy the products we advertise on our websites? Are they going to subscribe to our platform?

No. So why should we optimize for people who do not matter to our bottom like?

Well the answer could be yes. There is no reason to think they won't use those services if they had access to those services. If you have no way to access a service, then obviously you won't use a service. It's like an untapped/under-served market.

> Are they going to buy the products we advertise on our websites?

Why wouldn't they? Physical location aside, they're not any different than you or I. They have purchasing power like everyone else.

> Are they going to subscribe to our platform?

Why wouldn't they? Because they can't load your page? Doesn't sound like their problem.

> No. So why should we optimize for people who do not matter to our bottom like?

Why don't they matter to your bottom line? Because you present them with tools and platforms they can't use, so they can't contribute to your bottom line? A self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one.

You have cause and effect mixed up. The answer to all those questions might very well be "yes" if you built a site that's actually conducive to them doing business with you.

> The '30% of rural Americans still not on broadband' point is, understatedly, one of the most important points of the article by far.

I didn't care for the metric. How many rural Americans are there? Is it 1% of the population? 50%?

According to the 2010 census, roughly 20% of people in the US are classified as rural. So that means 6% of all Americans are not on broadband. That metric would be a lot more useful to most people.

Yeah the world rural population percentage has dropped steadily for the last 50 years, dropping below 50% in 2007.

The rural population has actually been growing the entire time; but as a percentage its dropped.

With 30% having bad internet you'd think there would be a push in those communities to get better internet.

Then again, the lack of internet usability may create an image of the internet as not being worth it. If you have no access to the better things on the internet, then you may think that there is nothing of real value on it so you won't push for better internet.

"the lack of internet usability may create an image of the internet as not being worth it."

People having slower internet speeds is a serious problem with the web (because of modern web design), not with most of the other things the internet is used for.

Personally, as websites have become more dangerous and less usable, I've been finding the web to be a smaller and smaller space as the years go by. For the first time in my life, I can see that it's entirely possible that I will largely stop using the web.

However, that in no way means I'll stop using the internet.

I get what you're saying, but for most people the internet, and the web are nearly synonymous.

Yes, I know, which is why I push back on this every time it comes up.

That people equate the web with the internet is a very bad thing for both the web and the internet.