A modest proposal for reducing mail traffic (1996) (opens in new tab)

I think about all of the emissions generated from software every day. I feel a little bit better when I refactor an endpoint from a p99 of 3 minute to 3 seconds. Then feel worse when I realize a youtuber canceled out those gains 100x over when they uploaded a 4k clickbait video about some drama happening on Twitch.

I don't get it. I know the Johnathan Swift reference, and the many parodies of parodies based on it. But I don't get why the author is being so sarcastic about things. Was compression or optimization "overdone" in 1996? I was just a kid looking up the new Ultra 64 on the library computers at the time. These days, saving 8 bytes per message could be a legitimate bug fix at Google, or even a OKR, depending on the tradeoffs. It adds up to tangible money on the scale of a billion users. I suppose 1996 was starting to ride the dot com bubble, and during a bull market optimization might have been a waste of time. Was that the idea here?

DJB's proposal is especially entertaining in the modern world of DKIM, where headers are often many times the size of the actual emailed message 8-)

Many more of his proposals, outside of sarcasm, should be heeded for a more user oriented internet in the new millennium...

The reference in the title: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/modest_proposal