Tim Kadlec writes about “The ethics of web performance” and the idea of web performance having ethical ramifications.

When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to see one could argue performance doesn’t have ethical ramifications. So clearly, folks who have built a heavy site are bad, unethical people, right? Here’s the thing. I have never in my career met a single person who set out to make a site perform poorly. Not once. People want to do good work. But a lot of folks are in situations where that’s very difficult.

The business models that support much of the content on the web don’t favor better performance. Nor does the culture of many organizations who end up prioritizing the next feature over improving things like performance or accessibility or security.

I would argue the other angle, “Web performance as compassion” to show how you can show compassion for the users of your software through performance.