Honestly, I never notice load times from news sites because they're all an advertising cesspool and I run Brave + layered ad blockers on my computer and mobile devices. As a point of curiosity I wonder how these sites would compare with ad blocking enabled.
But at the end of the day I care a lot more about their serious, reliable content (or lack thereof) than a few milliseconds. I'll wait 3 seconds for good news rather than 200ms for trash.
(Not at all saying legiblenews.com is trash. I've honestly never heard of it. I'm just speaking in general terms here.)
As of June 2022, CNN.com downloads over 8.9 megabytes of images, videos, and advertisements. With an ad blocker, CNN.com still downloads an incredible 2.4 megabytes of data. All that heft means you have to wait longer for everything to download over the Internet, then wait for your browser to process it all and display it on screen.
I don't really expect slow/fast news websites to be a big deal for the HN crowd since we all know how to run ad blockers in our browsers or PiHole.
My goal here is to make less technical people aware of the speed they're sacrificing when they read websites like CNN, Fox News, etc. There's a lot of privacy implications too I'd like to make people aware of, but I haven't found an easy service/scanner like Google PageSpeed Insights.
"Trash news" is a real problem, and no offense taken to the fact you've never heard of Legible News. I source headlines from Wikipedia, which is why I donate to them for people who buy a subscription. Legible News is more of a news aggregator than anything, which links of to news institutions that people have heard of.
How are you pulling your data? (there are 3 different Wikipedia APIs, with various levels of data).
I suggest you look at the the Features Content API (https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/feed/featured/2022/06/2...). This could be fun for you to use, since it also gives you a list of the most visited pages on Wikipedia in the previous 24 hours, which often surfaces interesting topics of current event.
Honestly, I never notice load times from news sites because they're all an advertising cesspool and I run Brave + layered ad blockers on my computer and mobile devices. As a point of curiosity I wonder how these sites would compare with ad blocking enabled.
But at the end of the day I care a lot more about their serious, reliable content (or lack thereof) than a few milliseconds. I'll wait 3 seconds for good news rather than 200ms for trash.
(Not at all saying legiblenews.com is trash. I've honestly never heard of it. I'm just speaking in general terms here.)