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Comment by mark242 | Hacker News Reader

Here's the disconnect, which is why these "webpages need to be slim!" sites tend to make me think they're greybeard nostalgia for an internet that doesn't really exist anymore.

Your 1mb webpage is approximately 60ms worth of Disney+ streaming.

Your 1mb webpage is approximately 1.7s worth of Zoom chat.

Your 1mb webpage is approximately 1.9s worth of Tiktok video.

Unless you are specifically targeting low-bandwidth users, you need to worry about product market fit long before you worry about slimming your js bundles down.

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> Unless you are specifically targeting low-bandwidth users

There aren't some tiny number of low bandwidth users with some esoteric internet problem, there is a significant divide due to technological and geographic reasons. Averages are very misleading when the majority of people in cities connected to various fiber end points keep getting crazier and crazier speeds while 50% of the US is stuck on ADSL, with a theoretical max of 20Mbit down - add geographical limitations and that's often far lower due to line noise. Where I live in the UK it's also just a matter of luck, I live in the middle of a major city and yet in the 5 places I've lived over the last 10 years the only option was ADSL, and never >6Mbit.

I haven't even started the argument about other countries with poorer internet infrastructure.

When you assume being able to download at 1MiB/s is basic, you make the internet suck for a huge chunk of the population, they are not the majority - but barely.

> Averages are very misleading when the majority of people in cities connected to various fiber end points keep getting crazier and crazier speeds while 50% of the US is stuck on ADSL, with a theoretical max of 20Mbit down - add geographical limitations and that's often far lower due to line noise.

Can you cite your source on "50% of the US is stuck on ADSL"? Furthermore, do you mean 50% of the US land area or 50% of the US population? The former is plausible, the latter is not.

Even if you are able to get palatable speeds, bandwidth caps are an issue for some people.

For example, I'm stuck with 40GB/month in rural Ontario (ie, 5 minutes outside of a city), which means I share roughly 1300mb per day with my household. I'm constantly watching the bandwidth meter tick up in my menu bar.

You are not only conflating megabytes (MB) with megabits (mb) but you are also conflating latency (a site loading) with throughput (a buffered video playing).

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