The Arc CMS was supposed to be a key to The Washington Post’s future. It became a problem instead. #journalism
New at Media Nation: https://dankennedy.net/2024/09/25/arc-was-supposed-to-be-a-key-to-the-washington-posts-future-it-became-a-problem-instead/
#MediaIndustry
@[email protected] I ovten look at WaPo through a web browser on an ancient, very slow Chromebook. And when I say “slow” I mean “glacially slow” and with few simultaneous TCP connections.
The WaPo website is so badly larded with trackers and ads and other garbage than when I click on something to read it takes so long to load that I can go to the Guardian and read another article there while I am waiting for WaPo to load the piece I want to see.
On top of that the WaPo website is so filled with vast oceans of Javascript that it takes a long time - many tens of seconds - for things like the main page layout to settle down. If one doesn’t wait one often clicks on a article but gets a different one.
The WaPo web experience is a disgrace.
And the WaPo App on tablets like the Amazon Kindle/fire is abysmal as well, but not as bad as the website.
@[email protected] That’s not my experience with the iOS apps at all. The WashPost and The Boston Globe are super-fast, much faster than the NYT.
@[email protected] The website seems to demand massive HTTP references to both WaPo and third party sites - so loading it very much depends on a large number of simultaneous TCP connections, something that is not allowed by the old Chromebook.
Just now I loaded the WaPo website on a vastly more powerful Macbook that can handle gobs of simultaneous TCP connections and it still took the WaPo website layout perhaps ten seconds to fully settle down. I just turned on the browser developer tool to show the network connections and watched the display scroll connection attempts - so many that it looked like the waterfall display in a Matrix movie.
I’ve seen the WaPo website stop cold when some 3rd party trackers (or DNS lookups) become slow or non-responsive.
(On this Macbook I short-circuit everything to Google’s trackers, which greatly speeds up nearly every website, I can see that it is greatly speeding the WaPo load time as well.)
@[email protected] this sounds a lot like their tech owner wanted to turn his newspaper into a tech company with a recurring revenue stream that wasn’t news and it went poorly.
Bezos would have been better off venture funding a separate CMS company and let WaPo do what it’s good at, journalism.
