HN Explorer

Ask HN: What is the most bloated website you use

37 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 ↗ HN
Looking for examples of bloated websites where you are seeking some textual data/information but have to suffer to retrieve it. EDIT: Preferably sites that do not require log in to access the data/information.

120 comments

[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] thread
arkitaip
Reddit has lots of valuable info, especially if you are looking for tips on products, but the UI isn't just bloated, it's downright hostile with its dark patterns to make you use their terrible mobile app.
actually_a_dog
Old reddit is much better all around in that regard.
trextrex
The old Reddit UI is still available under the old.reddit.com domain. I use browser extensions to automatically redirect to the old saner UI every time I visit Reddit.
hobos_delight
There's no need for a browser extension, you can enable it as a setting in your profile if you're logged in.
djhworld
The 'new' Reddit UI caused my Intel macbook to get really hot just clicking around, it's not so bad on the M1 but I still prefer the old reddit UI, which feels snappy.
tlb
My bank (a Bank of America subsidiary). Takes about 12 seconds to log in, 5 - 6 seconds to load each page in their site. My typical session (check that a transaction went through, or read a message through their secure portal) takes a minute or two. Infuriating.

Data transfer isn't a major factor, it's all delay in their servers.

dole
our regional electric utility provider's site is slick, all ajax and pretty and every click takes at least 30 seconds to complete an action. it's noticably slower than most other bloated sites, and i don't understand how their developers, much less anyone else can stand it. it can't be THAT much faster being local to the machine or network.
frou_dh
I don't actually use it that often, but when I do use Jira, every action seems to have a noticeable delay.

I don't remember it being like that a decade ago. Maybe there was a big rewrite or two that bloated things up?

cies
Jira, hands down. So slow! It's at a point we're looking for alternatives.
boboche
+10 amen to that.

In 13 years it went from something I pushed and installed at every client I helped with business processes, help desk, Dev… to an overbloated frustrating mess to operate and manage.

Just changing a dropdown field’s content now is hidden in sublayers that requires a bookmark if you are not toying with that on a daily basis.

(not everybody is an actual full time Jira admin, and a Jira admin should’nt have the mental load of an Exchange admin for such an application).

Happy to hear about alternatives experiences as well.

cosmodisk
"not everybody is an actual full time Jira admin, and a Jira admin should’nt have the mental load of an Exchange admin for such an application".

Couldn't agree more. I've got admin rights to quite a few systems, including Exchange, which is a pretty big ship,so to speak. However, having tried Jira it's hands down the most convoluted piece of software I've ever seen. It took me less time to spin up an instance on AWS+ configure its access to the internet than it took to make a few changes on Jira. God knows how they managed to do It.

jkingsbery
Every team I was a part of between 2007 and 2014 used Jira, and I pretty much haven't used it since. It was notoriously slow back then.
hughrr
JIRA is awful. I notice they dropped the slogan “because you’ve got issues”. Perhaps because it was too close to home
dkarl
Jira has been slow and buggy for me for over a decade at companies of every size. When Atlassian loses half its market share overnight to some new competitor, we'll talk about how inevitable it was. Nobody has cracked that nut yet, but they will.
new_here
Totally. A light UI with some tuned edge caching and you will be golden.

There are quite a few competitors popping up, the main issue is that they all seem to be bootstrapped and don't have the funding to make a disruptive marketing splash.

dkarl
I feel like the big marketing splash that will push a hot new competitor over the edge will be an acquisition by a big company. "BigCo acquires issue tracking startup X" will be the headline for a week, and they will gain a ton of credibility and momentum, and they will eat Atlassian's lunch. Eventually the big company will ruin them, and we'll end up with another slow and buggy version of Jira, but maybe we'll get a good 5-10 years of the default, ubiquitous issue tracking software being clean and snappy. I'd like to experience that before I retire.
cosmodisk
It's not hard to build something like Jira, it's not even that special. However it can be painful to uproot it once installed and used for years. It's probably not an issue for a small shop with a few devs, but imagine a large software house with hundreds if not thousands of devs and the amount of info that goes into Jira. Nobody wants to be that guy who proposes 6 month company wide data migration. That's the main reason it will take years to dethrone it.
igetspam
I haven't tried it with a full team but clubhouse is nice. I've used it for personal things and it mostly works as I'd expect it to.
new_here
https://linear.app actually looks pretty cool. Real-time sync, keyboard shortcuts, clean UI, dark mode and a quick action CLI thing.
thrower123
The Wells Fargo website is just broken most of the time. I'll click on my account, when it does let me log in, and it automatically logs me out.
blinktag
There are too many to list nowadays. I keep one browser setup with JavaScript disabled for when I want to look up a product review, a recipe, or a how-to (even on my mobile devices). I’ve set all my browsers to disable autoplay (why is this not the default?). The web is becoming a miserable, slow, annoying experience. It’s hard to believe that as we have the best tools ever and the fastest computers that we’re choosing to inflict the most burdensome and repellent experiences on our users. God help us.
jbverschoor
Ah.. so you need a gatekeeper for the quality of the deployed software....
travisjungroth
Walled garden seems popular based on behavior, but rarely a position that a user reasons themselves into. People who really care about this stuff would rather use emacs as a browser than an app store. Not trying to make a judgement, but it really seems like a vocal minority / silent majority case.
coldpie
NoScript and uBlock Origin go a long way to making the web usable-ish. There's still hurdles, but at least you have to opt into those hurdles instead of having every website punch you in the face with garbage. Works on Firefox for Android, too.

The thing that's driving all of the bad behavior you're talking about is the advertising business model. The sooner we can destroy web advertising as a viable business model, the better.

MeinBlutIstBlau
Noscript is such a PITA though. A phenomenal app, but goes to show it's borderline impossible to stop that abuse as it makes your experience almost entirely unusable.
coldpie
Yeah, that's the trade-off. Let random JS crap run on every website, or put up with NoScript. The modern web totally sucks.
smt88
Every news or recipe site is basically a disaster now. I don't understand how anyone can browse without uBlock Origin installed on their phone.

The dual motivations of SEO and making money from ads have just saturated those sites.

sofixa
Not every both the Guardian and BBC ( who also have a recipe site) are pretty OK.
Jtsummers
Current recipe sites:

  <ad>

  Make Cookies Like Grandma Used To!

  <ad>

  [Jump to recipe] <- only works half the time

  Let me tell you about my time with my grandmother,
  making cookies with her on Sunday afternoons in the summer.

  <ad>

  [READ MORE]

  So there I was, making a mess like usual.

  <ad>

  <20 more sentence or paragraph and ad pairings>

  Recipe:

  [READ MORE]

  Ingredients:

  - 2 1/2 cups of flour
  - 1/2 cup of sugar
  - Eggs (wait, how many?)
  ...

  1. Beat sugar and butter in a mixer.

  [READ MORE]
Breza
The other day my wife asked why I have so many cookbooks. Your comment is why.
betamaxthetape
The Twitter website on mobile devices. I've just timed myself to see how long it took to view my own twitter profile on my phone (I don't use Twitter on my phone, hence I'm not logged in).

It took 15 seconds to load the profile, but I couldn't view any tweets until I'd pressed the "Not Now" button to the pop-up asking me to install the app. Five seconds later, I was able to view my most recent / pinned tweet.

This is all for a service that delivers a timeline of (primarily) text, with some images and video. It should not take 20 seconds to load!

FabHK
And Twitter refuses to work without Javascript. For 280 characters of text...
nojser
Originally it was just a fullscreen nag div on top of the already rendered content, so if you can delete elements, it should work for viewing or you can use something like Nitter.net

Nitter.net[0] solves a lot of these problems and paired with Redirector[1], it's a transparent switch out.

There's an expired cert issue 3 days ago, but there are other instances[2]

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

dalmo3
I only visit twitter through links shared by friends, and ever since their last redesign 50-80% of the links give an "error loading" message which may or may not go away after reloading the page a few times.

When/if the tweet finally loads, it shows totally unrelated messages at the bottom. I still have to click on it and load it again if I want to see the comments thread.

The upside is that the redesign was the most effective way to keep me completely off twitter.

iamben
brooklynvegan.com - on my relatively well specced (intel) Mac it'll start up the fan and grind to a halt at some point.
fuzzy2
I think Yammer takes first place. It's required reading at work (the main feed). It loads incredibly slowly (I think it's like 5 redirects for auth and whatnot) and the default "What's new" view is entirely useless.

Jira and Confluence are excruciatingly slow, too, but at least the information isn't hidden behind useless feeds.

igetspam
Ouch. Someone tried to force yammer on us at a previous company because of a Good Ole Boys Club relationship. It died loudly. I'm sorry.
jrib
JIRA.

For personal stuff, bloated websites just get replaced with less bloated alternatives. At work, I don't have that luxury...

vsareto
Definitely whichever one I'm currently working on
barbs
Facebook. Aside from all the obvious privacy problems, the product itself is also ridiculously bloated for what it is.
ndury
I'm surprised Facebook hasn't been mentioned (yet). The mobile application is workable but the desktop version is just awful
every
Agreed. If wasn't for near and extended relations who will use nothing else, I would avoid it entirely...
toastal
Huh. I guess I forgot about it. My browser has touch.facebook come up if I type in the URL bar and I've basically only used the touch version even on desktop for ages.
pta2002
I honestly find the opposite. Facebook's website seems to be one of the best ones of this new SPA trend, and doesn't seem to have any speed issues. The (android) app meanwhile consistently lags for me, and things like voting on polls have a 50/50 chance of working.
raydev
Same. I find the app to be actively hostile as its always showing me notification badges for no reason.

That new giant F button in the tab bar always has a number on it that disappears when I tap, but there's no obvious content for me to look at there.

Desktop FB is pleasant. No fake notification badges.

darksaints
LinkedIn, partly because the tech is so bloated and slow and it makes it hard to navigate/search, but also because literally 99% of the site is bloviating self-promotion spam.
yawnxyz
I'm always surprised at how terrible Linkedin's design and engineering has been over the years. The latest redesign is definitely very welcome
other_herbert
Adobe XD for designs/ wireframes... Jira is small in comparison
debarshri
I might be naive, fairly new in UI. So my questions are as follows -

What does bloated website actually mean? What is characteristics of a bloated website?

I could imagine something that bloated for you, might not be bloated for me? Are there any metrics that quantifies this?

mr_sturd
Visually, it can be ads taking up large amounts of screen space, making the information that you're looking for a pain to find.

In the background, it can be that your browser is making requests to heaps of tracking services and CDNs when loading the page.

codyb
Another example are the poorly optimized websites where each tab uses > 100mb of memory and the all pops new tabs open frequently (I’m looking at you JIRA).

I’ve basically just stopped browsing the web at this point. It’s nigh on unusable sometimes. I buy recipe books, read the NYTime’s daily newsletter, and browse hackernews. Reddit’s unbearable these days, Twitter’s a bit of a dumpster fire even if it wasn’t bloated (I don’t have social media accounts to curate the experience either), and god forbid you click a link on a news aggregator site like Fark (where the headlines are as misleading as something your Great Aunt shared from some long chain of disinformation anyways), even with ad blockers half the pages are just absolutely bonkers.

It’s just not worth it anymore. My print copy of the New Yorker and occasionally some blog posts from here.

debarshri
You can look at it from a different perspective. I wouldn't mind if an app like figma takes a huge amount of memory. It is comes in my critical professional path. I think if an app falls in your life's critical path, you can look past the memory, cpu usage, bloati-ness etc. I am judging website these days with this kind of yardstick.
codyb
Oh yea certainly, but Figma vs JIRA for instance. One, as a professional design suite dealing with image manipulation and simplified component emulation I sort of expect to take up some memory.

On the other hand, JIRA displays lists of tickets. It should be a bit snappier probably. There’s gotta be a way to display 200 tickets without it slowing my computer down. It’s certainly not the text that’s the issue, HN displays that many comments fairly easily and without hiccup.

igetspam
This is one of the reasons I still use RSS. I get the info I want in a simpler form and I can quickly bypass things I'm not interested in.
gbromios
As with most things UI, it's subjective and difficult to quantify, but in the context of a website, it could mean a few things.

If you, as a user, feel that the site is sluggish, unresponsive or difficult to use because it feels too crowded or has too many features, you might judge that site to feel bloated.

In a more technical sense, bloated might refer to very large (or poorly optimized) files, either javascript or static assets, required to run the thing, causing it to load slowly (i.e. at a speed that the user feels is "slowly").

So maybe a good summary might be: "does too much stuff and/or poorly optimized/coded"

Again, not exactly a tight definition, but UIs are inherently characterized by the perception of their users.

debarshri
I think becomes difficult to argue and render this question invalid if we fail to quantify a problem.

I know it is subjective thing that is the reason why I asked this question. For me all UIs are bloat the CLI experience is the best, for someone else, it might not be.

The bloating problem from my perspective might just be a UX problem that the framework you use or the library you use.

gbromios
> I think becomes difficult to argue and render this question invalid if we fail to quantify a problem.

It is difficult. It's probably the central difficulty of UIs on the web. However what I said is still true: The quantification inherently rests on users' perception of their experience. This is more a question of psychology than of computer science.

What percentage of your users feel that the app is too slow or confusing? What percentage would you be okay with? If you're selling some kind of enterprise software whose users will not be the buyers but rather the buyers' employees, who cares if it takes 30 seconds to load every page and another 30 seconds to find the widget you need once it's loaded?

The definition of "too bloated" is a function of both how users feel and also how much value you get from reducing it, and the measurement of "bloated-ness" (as well as many other parameters of UX) can't happen without getting feedback from users, which means there's a pretty strict limit to how much we can understand just from discussing theory.

And just to further complicate things: If I'm making a richly featured web app (something like Slack for example) I have a predefined set of features that will need to be implemented using javascript. Obviously there are many parameters that determine how well these are designed and implemented and optimized, all of which will affect how the users perceive the app as a whole. However, what about users (say, some plurality of HN readers) who intrinsically value websites which function without javascript, and will always consider those that don't to be bloated; What use is it to quantify that if it's always going to run up against my stated goal of building a chat app in the browser?

hdctambien
Loading a page of text is effectively instantaneous. If the user's goal is to read that text, then anything else on the page that slows it down is bloat (from the user's perspective).

All the stuff that is extraneous to the reason you visited the webpage would be bloat.

Think about a news article on [insert your favorite news website]. Often before you can see the article, you have to process a bunch of JS (SPA framework, tracker code, etc) before the text loads and you can get the info you were looking for.

debarshri
Loading the page instantaneous is again can be solved by adding spinner.

Sure, adding tracker and other stuff might be a jarring experience. But I think you can have all the stuff in your app and make it async so that it does not impact the core functionality of the app.

hdctambien
Adding a spinner is just putting lipstick on the bloat. Progressively loading a page can at least hide the bloat from the end user.

A page of text should just be a page of text. That's the beauty in sites like hackernews and craigslist. They are down-and-dirty, just-the-facts, we'll-get-out-of-your-way websites.

You see bloat when you start adding stuff that obscures that core functionality and/or slows down/degrades the experience.

Of course, the core functionality changes depending on who you are. The customer might just want to read the article, but the sales team wants to get you to see/click on ads and the marketing team wants you to signup for their newsletter. So, one person's bloat is another person's core functionality.

mr_sturd
Every time I'm taken to an NPR article, I'm offered a choice to accept or reject their non-essential cookies. When I click reject, I'm given a text-only version of the article. It's glorious.
igetspam
There has a been a lot of work in this area. Look up discussions around Net Promoter Score (NPS). There's a general belief that page load time has a rather direct relationship with user happiness and how likely they are to recommend your service. It's not my area of expertise but I think it's something like 2s on a decent connection. No action should take longer than that.

For example:

* Page should load to a useful state (could still be background tasks) in under 2s

* Clicking a link should take me to the next page and it should be useful in under 2s

* Making a change to a config item and saving the update should complete in under 2s

If your service can do that, you customers will feel like your system is fast. On the other hand, this is generally considered a technical crowd and we probably look at resource consumption. A site that eats 25% of one of my CPUs and requires 128M of RAM just to load is going to check my box for bloated.

petercooper
I don't know if it's really bloated but in terms of feeling terrible, it's Google Cloud's various dashboards. The underlying page loads in reasonably enough, but then everything on top is 'hydrated' on the go and it psychologically feels dragged out, like how pages used to load in the 90s but faster.
dkarl
I haven't worked with Google Cloud dashboards much, but I feel like I recognize what you're talking about. I hate pages that load quickly with everything missing and then incrementally load all their components, even if it happens very quickly. As soon as the page comes up, my brain starts fruitlessly working to figure out how to interact with it, while it churns through its transformation into an actual working page. Instead of wasting my attention like that, just be honest and don't ask for my attention until you're ready for it.
tasubotadas
Gmail.
rogem002
I switched to Protonmail as my main email & have been very happy.

Every time I go back to check my old Gmail (I use it for signing up to products I know will spam me) I get very irritated at everything.

Wowfunhappy
The heaviest website I use is Figma, but for completely understandable reasons—it's a professional piece of design software, which so happens to take the form of a website. A questionable choice, perhaps, but Figma is still relatively performant for what it is.
Adrig
Reddit by far. I find the old version unappealing but the new is just a dumpster fire. I'm basically dreading any missclick because I'll be stuck for a few seconds. Not to mention the worst video player on the internet.

This website's performance is shameful.I would spend easily twice as much time on Reddit as I do right now if it was snappy

zozos
Man, I have been soo disappointed by the new Reddit interface. Its terrible.
cainxinth
I hate the new version. If they ever kill old.Reddit.com I will be very unhappy.
logicslave
Reddit must just have terrible developers. Like they havent paid them enough and it shows in the product. But its the most popular forum on the internet, so people use it anyways.
seattle_spring
That's what you get when you abolish negotiation. Helps the lowest common denominator, but hurts top talent.
raydev
I was rushing to the thread to post this. The new site, even after all this time, is dramatically slower to load content than old.reddit. Does anyone at reddit actually use reddit?

Another issue is pretending comment threads are modal?? If I click to read comments, it presents a sheet of comments that if you accidentally click outside them, they just disappear.

And they broke the back button, so when you go back to read those comments you accidentally dismissed, you don't land at your previous scroll position.

Trisell
I find these days almost any local tv news website to be all but unusable. Between the multiple ad pop ups, multiple auto play videos, and the general clutter. Just trying to read a single news story is an effort that pisses me off to the point where I just close out the tab instead of reading the article.