Reminds me of the UK’s Government Digital Services, who want to digitise government processes but also have a responsibility to keep that service as accessible and streamlined as possible, so that even a homeless person using a £10 phone on a 2G data service still has an acceptable experience.
An example. Here they painstakingly remove JQuery (most modern frameworks are way too big) from the site and shave 32Kb off the site size.
Hasn’t been linked to reddit yet probably.
Getting away from reddit has shown me that there are unspoiled places in the digital world out there, communities of people who actually care about the topic and not performatism and internet attention.
The issue with UK services is that they all are fucking random and plenty of sections don’t work. There are billions of logins, bugs and sometimes you just get redirected to some bloody nightmare portal from 1990-s. And EU citizens couldn’t log in into HMRC portal for years after Brexit, what a fucking joke! And all they do is spend time removing jQuery, good fucking job!
At a certain point it makes more sense to subsidize better low-end hardware than to make every web site usable on a 20 year old flip phone. I’d argue that if saving 32 kB is considered a big win, you’re well past that point. Get that homeless guy a £50 phone and quit wasting the time of a bunch of engineers who make more than that in an hour.
Get that homeless guy a home.
Also, if you are in a basement/mountains/middle of Siberia, waiting for 32 kB takes quite some time.
I’m all for ending homelessness, but that’s really a different problem than we were discussing. I’m pretty confident jQuery isn’t stopping anyone from being housed.
Anyway, there’s no way you’re gonna convince me 32 kB is a lot of data. It’s just not. Even the slowest 3G connections can download that much in half a second. Just the text of this thread is probably more than 32 kB. If you can’t download that much data, you only technically have Internet service at all.
Also, engieneers already had tech debt of updating to new jQuery version, which can result in a lot of wierd bugs, so it was achiveing two goals at once.
And probably 50£ phone IS their target device.
