It's like there's a Law of Conservation of Bloat: browsers are hugely fast; computers are hugely fast; even broadband is getting to the point of usability (in North America) -- how can software tumors metastasize? Where is there an opportunity to slow things down and make them shittier?
>Wirth's law is a computing adage made popular by Niklaus Wirth in 1995.[1][2] It states that "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster." - Wikipedia
There's also a related "law": “What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.”
> "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
I used to think this was true. For me, the perceived inflection point where perceived speed of software started improving was somewhere around 2008. This may be because I switched to a mac in 2006 and the releases around that era had a big performance focus.
How much patience did people have back in the 90s when broadband and computers were slower? (Hell, it sometimes took 30 minutes just to dial into AOL without getting a busy signal.) Now that computers and broadband are faster, do you think people have just as much patience as before or less?
I'd imagine that, until broadband becomes truly instant, you will have a need to ensure users that the page is still loading. A user's patience will never grow. It will only shrink. The least we can do is buy ourselves precious seconds by using a progress bar. It is the difference between "Your call is important to us, please hold" and "You are now 5th in line to be answered. Please hold." The illusion of progress goes a long way in fooling the user's brain into having just a smidge more patience.
Well, OK, but that's orthogonal to the question of: what is causing this bloat, and why is that considered sacrosanct, as opposed to the user's time and energy? Reasonable people can disagree as to where that line is drawn, of course, but with sheerest garbage like Medium, where the putative goal is to give people something to read, it looks to me like they're driving a process for the sake of driving a process, and deserve to be mocked for it.
It sort of puts paid to the idea of progress.