[HN Gopher] PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article th...
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PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps
downloading
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score : 215 points
Date : 2026-03-22 18:23 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stuartbreckenridge.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (stuartbreckenridge.net)
| goldenarm wrote:
| I'm trying to migrate to 100% RSS right now, to avoid the hateful
| algorithmic editorialization of modern social media.
|
| And I'm shocked that almost no paid media provides full articles
| in RSS anymore, and force me to navigate their 37MB pages with
| popups all over the place. Has anyone found a solution against
| that ?
|
| Edit : Sorry I'm asking specifically about paywalled stuff
| righthand wrote:
| Reader mode + ad blocker
| bryancoxwell wrote:
| Further: configure reader mode as the default for the sites
| you're most commonly linked to.
| impure wrote:
| There are readers with a 'full text mode' which will fetch the
| website and display it in something like Mozilla's Readability
| view. It does not always work, especially if the page is
| paywalled but it works for most sites.
| goldenarm wrote:
| Most quality journals are paywalled nowadays, I'm considering
| to scrape using my cookie, or maybe use archive.is..
| 1bpp wrote:
| For a lot of sites Firefox's reader mode is great at
| bypassing paywalls, just turn it on & refresh
| themafia wrote:
| > no paid media provides full articles in RSS anymore
|
| Substack does and it's first class. Patreon does a decent job.
| specproc wrote:
| Not an RSS solution, also relies on US-based third parties.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Disable Javascript or use Lynx, Links or Dillo to open the
| articles from your newsreader. Some pages won't work obviously,
| you remove those from your feed.
| goodmythical wrote:
| no love for elinks?
| dbtc wrote:
| Maybe not considered a solution, but: print.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Pay for the web or print edition?
|
| Journalists need to eat as well as you do.
|
| The more people aren't supporting journalists weather in
| Substack or Reuters, the more articles that will be behind a
| paywall.
|
| It's such a shame as well since AI is also constantly bypassing
| and scraping RSS for business and commercial purposes,
| violating licenses.
| timthowtdi wrote:
| I use the iOS app of https://brutalist.report for this these
| days.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| Lighthouse can sometimes find RSS feeds for pages that don't
| show an RSS button on the page:
|
| https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder
| colechristensen wrote:
| I have thought of this, and I have thoughts about the ethics of
| this.
|
| In my spare time I'm developing a web RSS reader and
| considering effectively a Spotify model where users optionally
| have a paid subscription that is shared to article publishers
| to address the ethics of simply free stripping of ads as a
| service. I'd like it to be an optional paywall but haven't
| decided how to move forward
| perardi wrote:
| > Edit : Sorry I'm asking specifically about paywalled stuff
|
| Ah, you mean, like the NYTimes RSS feed. The NYTimes (and other
| paywall sites) only render the headline and one-sentence
| article summary. Like this:
|
| > Not All Malls Are Struggling
|
| > A certain type of shopping mall has become a surprising
| bright spot for real estate investors.
|
| You do not...please correct me if I'm wrong...and _cannot_ get
| a full-text RSS feed from the Times. Or Slate. Or [insert
| legacy media company here].
|
| Which is deeply frustrating. It's obviously a way to cut off
| the most blatant way for a bot to scrape the site, but c'mon,
| please, media tech teams, we can make private subscription RSS
| feeds work for podcasts, we can make it work for news. Your
| most engaged and nerdy and tech literate customers will go for
| it.
|
| In lieu of that, I use Safari, and I have it set to
| automatically pop into Reader mode
| (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/hide-distractions-
| whe...) when I hit certain websites. While I would prefer to
| read my news in NetNewsWire, hitting a de-shittified reader
| view in Safari is a decent fallback.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Well, it's otherwise "free" to read the article so I guess this
| is how one "pays" in the end.
|
| I wonder how this works on mobile data though which is
| significantlym more expensive than home network data.
| MBCook wrote:
| The title buried the lede.
|
| > In the five minutes since I started writing this post the
| website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads.
|
| I'm guessing this is due to autoplaying videos. *500 MB* in 5
| minutes.
|
| 37 MB is petite compared to that.
| dbtc wrote:
| Nah, in my opinion the original title is art. That line is a
| whopper though.
| MBCook wrote:
| Oh the rest of the title is great. But if it was me I don't
| think I could avoid putting the five on the front of the
| number.
|
| This is right up there with those articles from Wired or
| whoever about why you shouldn't give out your email, that
| when you open them there's a prompt to subscribe to their
| email list.
| timpera wrote:
| Downloading 500 MB in 5 minutes in the background of a random
| article is really disrespectful to readers on low-end devices
| or metered data plans (and these two groups are often the same
| people!). What a waste of ressources.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I've worked with a lot of people at the bottom end of society
| in the USA. They are given government provided phones they
| can use so they have access to Google Maps, email, job search
| apps etc. These phones come with 3GB of regular data per
| month. After that they drop down to 2G speed, but not in a
| way that will allow anything to actually load.
|
| Three days into the month these phones are just ewaste.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| I have 4g of data and never go over. I use it for maps,
| email even hn.
| abustamam wrote:
| Do you have a stable internet connection that is not your
| phone data plan? Many people in the lower economic class
| don't have that and their 3gb data plan may be the only
| 3gb they can use for the internet in any given month.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Many people in the lower economic class don 't have that
| and their 3gb data plan may be the only 3gb they can use
| for the internet in any given month._
|
| And poor people often share one phone for an entire
| family, or even one phone among two or three neighboring
| households. These are a lot of the customers I serve, and
| it has a lot of unique challenges around accounts,
| privacy, and yes data use.
|
| HN has no idea was poverty looks like.
| abustamam wrote:
| I rarely go over 3gb in a month. But, I also work from
| home, and I have stable internet connection from home.
|
| If their data plan is the only way they are able to access
| the internet then yes this is definitely a problem
| especially with random websites downloading literal
| gigabytes of ads.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Three days into the month these phones are just ewaste.
|
| If someone needs a phone like this for email and job
| searching and has no other option, 2G speeds will work.
| It's not e-waste for the intended purpose.
|
| It would be great if they got higher days caps, though,
| because let's be realistic in acknowledging that they're
| not only going to use it for Google Maps, email, and job
| search apps.
| tormeh wrote:
| Email and chat apps will work, but everything else will
| slow to a crawl at best and time out at worst.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _If someone needs a phone like this for email and job
| searching and has no other option, 2G speeds will work.
| It's not e-waste for the intended purpose._
|
| Guess how I know you've never actually tried this.
|
| Part of my job is testing the web sites I build in the
| terrible real-world conditions where our customers are.
| Places like machine rooms, deep basements, and small
| towns with only municipal or small-carrier 3G cell
| service. (In spite of what HN believes, there are plenty
| of places in America with 3G or even zero cell service.)
|
| 2G speeds will not work. The device or one of the
| essential thousands of processes in it will time out
| because they were designed by tech bubble tech bros who
| never use their apps in the real world.
| thevinter wrote:
| I lived for months with a 4GB roaming plan. Given, I was
| not using it at home since I had a wifi connection, but I
| rarely came close to using all my data unless I was
| watching YT videos when traveling or something.
|
| I share your sentiment and I agree we should be more
| mindful of people with metered/slow connections, but the
| last statement feels blown out of proportion.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I had a 200MB data plan until ~ 2018.
|
| I had data turned off most of the time. At home and in
| the office I had WiFi. Loaded the map before I left home.
|
| Most other places I was too busy doing whatever I was
| doing to use a phone. Since upgrading, I guess I can look
| products up in stores now. That's about it.
| pkaye wrote:
| Our Comcast plan has a monthly data usage of 1.2TB. We
| rarely go over 600GB in any month but month we nearly hit
| the limit. I was looking through the router logs to see
| what was going on and it turned out that somehow one
| particular Instagram video my spouse was watching would
| consume huge amounts of bandwidth when the channel was live
| streaming!
| al_borland wrote:
| Even with good bandwidth and unlimited data, it's still
| disrespectful.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| It is absolutely disgusting that even today it is impossible to
| stop video autoplay on Safari on iOS. I can't image the data
| wasted.
| simonw wrote:
| This is so upsetting. No wonder people spend more time in mobile
| apps than they do using the mobile web - the default web
| experience on so many sites is _terrible_.
| MBCook wrote:
| I've been using the Reddit app some lately after being a
| longtime old.Reddit.com + blocker person.
|
| Ignoring how [ad] navigation is kinda annoying [ad] the shear
| [ad] number of ads [ad] they [ad] insert [ad] is insane.
|
| The only good thing is none of them seem to be animated/video.
| Which is an incredibly low bar, but most sites can't even jump
| that.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| I'll probably leave reddit when old.Reddit.com gets the chop
| MBCook wrote:
| I suspect I will too. I've been playing with the app a bit
| as it's easier for me on my phone to view subs that are
| mostly pictures (e.g. awuariums). But I only do it from
| time to time.
|
| Apollo was much better, of course.
| ericd wrote:
| Same, but it sounds like Lemmy still has some issues, and
| it'll be hard to replace some of the niche subreddits.
| qingcharles wrote:
| This is the problem. There's no good replacement for
| Reddit right now, and Digg just died again.
| MBCook wrote:
| It kind of doesn't matter. The thing that makes Reddit,
| to me, is its size. Lemmy will never get there, so it
| won't be able to replace it for me.
|
| I love Mastodon, it's what I use, but it's not what I
| lost with Twitter. Some stayed, some went to BlueSky,
| some Threads, some just gave up. And we'll never have it
| again. Assholes destroyed a whole world out of
| selfishness.
| chuckadams wrote:
| To say nothing of all the personal data the app is hoovering
| up. Guarantee that every last thing you granted permissions
| for is something they're monetizing.
| simonw wrote:
| I had Claude Code profile the page (using headless Chrome) to
| see what was going on, here's the resulting report:
| https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/pcgamer-audit/R...
| m463 wrote:
| this just reminds me of...
|
| - watching "normal" cable tv
|
| - listening to "normal" fm radio
|
| - shopping on amazon (sponsored... everything)
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| A difference between cable and streaming is that cable has DVRs
| that let you skip commercials if you want, while streaming tech
| introduced unskippable ads.
| vel0city wrote:
| > cable has DVRs that let you skip commercials if you want
|
| The last time I had DirecTV several channels had managed to
| have unskippable ads in recordings. Paramount was egregious
| with this and was the first channel I saw with this "feature"
| enabled.
| MBCook wrote:
| This is why I pay to get rid of ads in things I like. Podcasts
| and TV are the big ones.
|
| I just started watching season 2 of Jury Duty on Amazon. I had
| deleted the app when they announced that as a paying subscriber
| I would be getting ads.
|
| Oh my God the ads are so horrible. So much worse than I
| remember.
|
| Also, extra kudos to Amazon for nearly doubling the price of
| removing the ads the week before the show came out. How nice of
| them.
| shellwizard wrote:
| Arr matey
| drnick1 wrote:
| Ahoy, sailor!
| al_borland wrote:
| > I had deleted the app when they announced that as a paying
| subscriber I would be getting ads.
|
| I completely cancelled Prime when they sent that email. To
| hit me with a monthly charge when I'm already paying a yearly
| fee just felt so cheap. I was already pretty unhappy with the
| direction Amazon had been heading; that email was the straw
| that broke the camel's back.
|
| My Amazon purchase volume dropped by 60% the following year,
| and another 10% the year after that. My goal is to get it
| down to 0, or at least in the single-digits of yearly orders.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| we need some sort of a universal crowd-sourced site rating
| system. Things like user experience, scamminess, user-hostility,
| site ownership-affiliations,etc.. all opt-in by users of course,
| you setup the criteria that is important to you and the browser
| displays different ratings or blocks certain sites (like
| scammy/fraudulent ones) out right. The reputation providers would
| also be selectable like search engines. I'd imagine there would
| be crowdsourced lists of all sorts.
|
| If you have older pepople struggling with cognition for example,
| this would be a good way to limit their exposure to scams.
|
| But commercial sites like this could also be rated as a privacy
| risk for the intense ad capitalism, or a 'bloat' to tell users it
| will slow down their computer by visiting the site. You could set
| it up so that when certain categories and ratings are met, the
| browser warns you before you could navigate to it.
|
| Another idea is to have this same system include alternative
| suggestions. For example, if a site has age verification, you
| would be able to setup your browser so that it warns you when you
| visit sites of that nature, listing alternatives recommended by
| the list maintainer, for whatever that site provides.
| herb_derb wrote:
| I wonder if you could automate the rating. Suppose you had some
| sort of engine where people could search for things, and the
| pages that get more clicks would have a higher rank. Plus you
| could supplement that by tracing links, since better pages will
| probably link to each other. As long as you promise to do no
| evil, I bet this would be a pretty good system.
| Barbing wrote:
| I suppose Google's doing this and they've built it into Chrome
| which is what grandma is using anyway, but what I've seen
| change over the past 20 years is the way these losers automate
| the cycling of their domains which are now registered with
| companies who couldn't care less about phishing.
|
| Apparently nobody's even checking if anyone responds to reports
| anymore, which does mean you're right that for some golden spam
| domains where they're typosquatting, getting the website on a
| block list would help. Then the losers probably wouldn't be
| able to use "bank-app[.]biz" for too long and would have to
| resort to uglyAlphabetSoupMess.tld (instantly refreshed as soon
| as it's added to any blocklist; & GPT spam college is open to
| continue training more script kiddies)
| PhilippGille wrote:
| On Kagi you can increase/decrease a domain's ranking for your
| personal search results, and they make the aggregated stats
| public, showing for example Pinterest as the most blocked site,
| which matches part of what you're looking for:
| https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights
| al_borland wrote:
| I hope whoever is running Pinterest sees they are the top 7
| most blocked sites.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| In Firefox + Unlock Origin: Downloads 5.6MB and then stops
| loading.
|
| Scrolling to the bottom of the page added 3MB of images and then
| stopped loading.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| Yet with RSS you can read between 300 and 1800 articles,
| depending on the feed type.
| Barbing wrote:
| >In Firefox + Ublock Origin
|
| This is the way, just gotta pay (journos)
|
| 37MB sounds like pure mismanagement though beyond
| understandable desperation. Surely a competent consultant could
| reduce that number with zero negative impact?
| underlipton wrote:
| Just gotta pay everyone who's not an asset owner, who
| actually worked for their money. So much dysfunction is just
| a matter of the owner class cornering wage negotiations and
| forcing people to make due with way less pay than their labor
| is actually worth. People don't pay for news because they
| can't afford to. There's an alternate universe where everyone
| makes the extra 20-30 bucks a month to afford a news
| subscription, and they pay it, and journalism happens in the
| interests of the people paying. Back in ours, journalism
| still happens in the interests of the people paying: the
| owners and advertisers.
| mrighele wrote:
| What is your screen resolution ? I have the same setup but got
| different results.
|
| Initial load, after closing cookie banner and another one, was
| about 500KiB (200KiB transferred). After scrolling to the
| bottom I got 1.7MiB/1.0MiB transferred.
|
| I guess you're using a retina-like display ? (I got there
| results with a 1080p screen)
| ui301 wrote:
| You mean Ublock, not Unlock, I assume?
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| The person who wrote the article and the people in charge of the
| site are different.
| devmor wrote:
| Sure, but it's a great example of the reason RSS readers are so
| great. No matter how much you enjoy the work of particular
| authors - their editorial oversight might make it too miserable
| to enjoy.
| acheron wrote:
| The writer chose to write for PC Gamer and sign their name
| publicly to an article on the site. You don't get to just say
| "oh, wasn't my decision, tee hee" when it's your name on the
| article.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Imagine trying to run an ad supported business to a bunch of
| people who are avid proponents of ad blocking.
|
| Also, thank you to the six people who download those 500MB to
| keep the site alive for the rest of us.
| KostblLb wrote:
| it's relatively easy for an ai to write such an article now, just
| open all websites and gather metrics while crawling...
| userbinator wrote:
| To use a good point of reference that I've seen others also start
| using lately, an installation of Windows 95 is roughly 40MB, so
| in loading that page you've downloaded approximately one Windows
| 95 installation. Then another 10+ times with the 500MB more that
| came after.
| dehrmann wrote:
| That's not a fair comparison. A desktop wallpaper could be 8 MB
| for a modern OS just because of screen resolution. A 4-minute
| music video would probably be 100 MB.
| abustamam wrote:
| But PC gamer isn't downloading 8mb wallpapers or 100mb 4k
| music videos. They're downloading ads and and other nonsense.
|
| Plus, if I decide to download a music video, that's on me. I
| chose to download a 100mb file.
|
| If I just want to read what amounts to a few paragraphs of
| text with some branding, I don't think it's fair to say that
| I'm also choosing to download 40+mb of nonsense that isn't
| text. Maybe in this new modern web, that is a conscious
| decision I make by clicking on any link anywhere, but I think
| the point of the article is that it shouldn't be the case.
| pas wrote:
| not using an adblocker is also on the user
|
| yes, it would be better if all ads were text only, so there
| wouldn't be this adtech fucking warfare for people's
| attention
| userbinator wrote:
| I don't mind small non-animated banners either, but
| anything animated or even audio is a hard DO NOT WANT.
| joquarky wrote:
| They need to have more ads so that they can support all the
| bandwidth used by all the ads.
| userbinator wrote:
| It's still useful for comprehending the scale of volume. The
| useful part of the article is a few KB.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I don't think comparisons to native compiled code for old low
| resolution computers are all that valid for multimedia
| websites.
|
| I can take a single photo with my iPhone that is larger than a
| Windows 95 installation depending on my output settings.
| throwaway5465 wrote:
| Windows XP + Encarta.
|
| The future is today!
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Encarta_
|
| You can still subscribe to the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
|
| It's one way of avoiding AI garbage.
| valicord wrote:
| I hate ads as much as anyone, but the OP article would be more
| convincing if it didn't itself include 6MB worth of screenshots.
| umarcyber wrote:
| This was the exact motivation that led me to develop my own news
| feed for a vulnerability dashboard I'm working on. I would wait
| for my NVD API calls to finish by scrolling tech sites but was
| always inundated by ads...
| elorant wrote:
| Thank God for uMatrix. Seriously, I don't know how I lived
| without that thing. Load times on everything are at least 30%
| faster.
| jdangu wrote:
| To measure network load, open dev tools, uncheck "disable caches"
| then clear your browser cache then load the page. Screenshot
| indicates network cache is disabled so the stated number is
| inflated.
| 63stack wrote:
| Both are measuring the amount of data transferred, one with hot
| cache, other is without. The number is not inflated.
| jdangu wrote:
| Websites routinely access the same urls over and over in a
| single page session, especially with aggressive ad refresh.
| Normally you only incur the first request as load, not the
| subsequent ones.
| djoldman wrote:
| I can't recommend enough limiting JS to an allowlist.
|
| By default, I browse without JS. If I get to a website that I
| want to explore that requires JS, I turn it on with one click:
|
| https://github.com/maximelebreton/quick-javascript-switcher
| mnkyprskbd wrote:
| At this point, if you browse the internet without an adblock; it
| is on YOU.
| busymom0 wrote:
| *without
| mnkyprskbd wrote:
| Yes, I just can't imagine why would one browser the internet
| without adblock.
| m0llusk wrote:
| When sites show me a bunch of ads and slow my machine with
| tracking then I just close the window. They don't want me to
| read their articles anyway. When a company shows you who they
| are ...
| touwer wrote:
| Even more embarassing is that the article adds really nothing to
| whatever was written before about rss. Probably gobbled up by AI
| dailyforge wrote:
| wtf is this tittle
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