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Comment by commonturtle | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a common sentiment among developers today but honestly bloat doesn't bother me too much. I do want good performance from my websites, but with fast internet connections, who cares if it is 1KB or 1MB?

Also, if you can develop a website for half the cost with twice the size, isn't that the right thing to do? Developer time is the expensive resource, and bandwidth is cheap.

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1. Not everyone in the world has a fast internet connection, or even a reliable one. Smaller pages have a better chance of making it through congestion or physical layer problems.

2. Even when speed is not an issue, many people are billed by the megabyte. My phone's data plan for example. I almost never use it for anything more than email and a handful of very trusted sites.

A fair assessment for an MVP in the US, but you fail to scale globally if your site is bloated as not all countries and territories have the access to data at low cost the US has. Definitely worth it to optimize and reduce bloat after establishing your product's place in the market (or develop from the get-go with reducing bloat in mind).

> have the access to data at low cost the US has

I don't know where you heard that, the US has some of the most expensive and slowest Internet access in the developed world.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...

I don't think this chart really tell much because most services are hosted in the US which some of these country have small or no direct link to (e.g. Thailand is 6th fastest in APAC on average speed, but the whole country has total of 30Gbps direct link to the US and pretty much have to route everything via HK or SG) which sometimes result in horrendous latency (~500ms) or speed (< 1 Mbps). It's fast at CDN edge where these surveys are taken, but page sizes still matter a lot.

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