[HN Gopher] PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article th...
___________________________________________________________________
PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps
downloading
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score : 807 points
Date : 2026-03-22 18:23 UTC (1 days 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
| hedora wrote:
| If you're paying, there's probably a way to get a RSS feed
| for paid subscribers. If you can't find it, maybe email
| tech support?
|
| This is how all the podcasts I donate to work (they offer
| ad-free feeds, bonus episodes, etc, usually with some url
| like https://rss.podcastsite.com/show?token=<random code>,
| and then in my podcast app, it either says "Some show -
| Paid feed", or sometimes "Some show - your name's feed".
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| From TFM:
|
| > _You can find the RSS feed for your publication
| athttps://your.substack.com/feed._
|
| > _Replace "your" with the name of your Substack
| publication._
| 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.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I don't think the complaint is that RSS doesn't get around
| paywalls, it's that even if you pay, many publications don't
| offer full-text RSS.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Because AI bots will scrape the full text RSS.
| Marsymars wrote:
| How is a web page with the full text more resistant to
| that than an RSS feed with the full text?
| 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.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I just don't pay for sites that don't offer full-text RSS (or
| email newsletters, for some sites) for subscribers.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| You can get the main content of a page as markdown via
| something like https://defuddle.md/
|
| I sometimes read things via Feeder (the Android app) and there
| I can also pull in some content, even things that aren't
| included in the original RSS.
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| i think rsshub can help with this, but im not 100% sure. its
| something you have to self host yourself, or pay a service like
| pikapods to run it for you
| 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:
| Wow, I had no idea.
|
| The shitty thing is that serving the under-served is
| almost by definition (and perhaps by design) not
| lucrative so such folks continue to go under-served.
|
| As we scale our products we think a lot about p99 and
| ensure we have all the 9s of uptime but even then we
| ignore the small percentage of folks who can't even begin
| to load our sites.
|
| Thanks for sharing and for your service, sir/madam!
| 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.
| what wrote:
| They can go to a library. Or go to basically any business
| (or sit outside) and use their WiFi.
| abustamam wrote:
| So instead of having website owners ship websites that
| don't attempt to download the entire internet to your
| device, your solution is to have people for whom
| bandwidth is a problem to go somewhere in order to just
| use the internet?
| 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.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| by email you mean pop3, imap and smtp or the heavy html
| web client?
| hedora wrote:
| I doubt email would work, even with imap or pop3. I get a
| lot of spam per day, and imap clients typically download
| unread messages.
|
| I guess you could configure it not to do that, or write
| your own imap client with better behavior -- on your 2G
| smartphone.
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| > (In spite of what HN believes, there are plenty of
| places in America with 3G or even zero cell service.)
|
| 0 of course, but wasn't 3G all shut down in the US in
| 2022 to open up the airspace?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _0 of course, but wasn 't 3G all shut down in the US in
| 2022 to open up the airspace?_
|
| One of those HN myths that comes from only being willing
| to Google (or ChatGPT) information, rather than
| encountering it in the real world.
|
| 3G still exists in rural and remote areas that no major
| carrier wants to serve, at least as of April, 2025 -- the
| last time I did a round of real-world web testing. Next
| round is in September. Maybe with 5G in the cities, some
| hand-me-down 4G equipment has made it to the places where
| I test.
| coryrc wrote:
| That's weird, because it's directly contradicting that
| the carriers themselves say they have decommissioned it.
|
| https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/plan-ahead-phase-
| out-3g...
| filoleg wrote:
| I don't believe there is a contradiction.
|
| The FCC page you linked is talking about major carriers
| decommissioning 3G.
|
| The grandparent comment is talking about rural/remote
| areas that no major carrier served in the first place.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I guess what I am getting from this thread is, there is
| 3G service out there in the wild. However, in locations
| where 4G and 5G is available, 3G has been phased out
|
| This doesn't jibe with my experience trying to make phone
| calls on rural highways, where it seems there is no
| signal whatsoever more often than not.
|
| I suppose this could be because ATT-Verizon-T-Mobile used
| to have 2G in that area (which was discontinued -- 900Mhz
| analog voice band, also decommissioned) has moved on and
| left swathes of the US without signal, whereas, certain
| areas (commenter omits an example) never were served by
| major telecoms and have "evolved" their tech more slowly,
| so 3G is not decommissioned in those places. In that
| sense yes there is no contradiction. It still feels like
| we've gone backwards since there are places I used to be
| able to make a phone call that are now considered remote
| area with satellite SOS being you're only way to reach
| someone
| coryrc wrote:
| The big-3 have nationwide coverage (well, at least 2 of
| them).
|
| But even beside that, AFAICT USCellular shut down 3G in
| January 2024, Appalachian Wireless in Dec 2022, Cellcom
| in Dec 2023, and C Spire sometime in 2022.
|
| I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still
| exists in the USA.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _That 's weird, because it's directly contradicting that
| the carriers themselves say they have decommissioned it.
| https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/plan-ahead-phase-
| out-3g..._
|
| Thank you for proving my point, that people on HN falsely
| think they know more than others because they can Google
| a link, even though what's happening on the ground is
| entirely different.
|
| Reality [?] policy papers, press releases, or web links.
| coryrc wrote:
| Or maybe you're incorrect? 3G is a technology and not a
| speed. Not sure why you believe your web traffic sampling
| is accurately identifying 3G.
| kuschku wrote:
| I used to have an extremely cheap phone plan that had
| 500MB data, then 64kbps for the rest of the month.
|
| You'd be surprised how far you can get with that. IRC
| works just fine (as long as you use Quassel w/
| Quasseldroid), HN works well, so does reddit (via
| redreader). RSS readers and wikipedia work as well, and
| for general web browsing you can set up a readability
| proxy (basically Firefox' Reader Mode, but server-side).
| And of course email works really well, too.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The COTS solution for _some_ web browsing is Opera Mini,
| which may still work? It also uses a proxy to prerender
| and compress websites, and worked ok at 2G speeds last I
| used it. It used to work well as a java applet and made
| the wider internet functional on feature phones. Very
| solid software.
|
| But as a practical matter, what people rely on phones for
| are services that are app-based. Good luck completing a
| Venmo transaction or any amount of banking.
| II2II wrote:
| Been there, done that, and all without the benefit of a
| home Internet connection. I also created a couple of
| scripts that I could run on my desktop computer to
| install new software or update my operating system. After
| running the scripts on my computer, I would wander over
| to the library with nothing more than my phone to
| download the packages along with grabbing some videos to
| watch offline.
|
| The issue isn't really living with 500 MB/month of data.
| For most people, it will simply be knowing that you can
| do that. The next issue they will face is having the
| technical ability to actually do so. Then, once you've
| done all of that, the question will remain: will they be
| interested in the stripped down Internet. A lot of us who
| frequent HN may be since the results will still reflect
| our interests. There are people on IRC who we would want
| to talk to. There is a slant towards tech sites with RSS.
| And so on. That isn't going to be reflected in sites
| targeted at a general audience.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Sure, me and you and everyone here can open a shell
| connection and do everything with text and it'll work
| great on 64kbps.
|
| Some of these guys have been locked up for 40 years
| straight. They're not doing all that extra stuff. They
| want to go on Indeed or Monster or YouTube. One job site
| I had to load on my desktop to find out why it wasn't
| working for them, only to discover the pages had a
| _250MB_ payload of random crap downloading, including
| videos.
| MBCook wrote:
| There is a spot near me near a local college that is a
| worthless dead zone for data.
|
| The signal is terrible, but it's there. You can talk on
| the phone or send texts.
|
| Surfing is horrible. At times you get great speeds. Two
| seconds later it feels like slow dial up. Really that's
| what it feels like most of the time, any kind of speed is
| the anomaly.
|
| As said in other comments, very few apps actually handle
| this well. They seem to expect that you either have a
| good connection or nothing.
|
| It's been like that for a decade plus. I assume it's just
| overloaded and will never be fixed.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Thank you. I often get people responding that 2G speed
| will work fine for email, chat, Google Maps etc. Maybe if
| I installed an IMAP client on their phone, maybe.
|
| But I can promise you from sitting with them dozens of
| times things like Google Maps are unusable once the
| connection is throttled. It might load some of the map,
| some of the time. But it never loads all of it and it is
| just plain unworkable. Even if it loads some of it it
| takes so long that the busses have gone past by the time
| they've tried to figure out what direction they need to
| go.
| strken wrote:
| Google maps works okay on slow connections if you
| download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand (not
| that non-technical unemployed people should be expected
| to do that).
|
| The worst thing is load balancers with a 10 or 20 second
| timeout, because there's almost nothing you can do other
| than use Opera Mini or something.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Google maps works okay on slow connections if you
| download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand
|
| At that point, why would you use Google Maps at all?
| Osmand will do the same thing, and requires _no_
| connection.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Because Google Maps is all they know? I've been on the
| web for 30+ years (wrote my own html home page by hand in
| 1995 while doing my master's) and have just now heard of
| "Osmand" for maybe the 2nd time in my life. The other
| being a few months ago. If I haven't heard of it, how
| would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who
| isn't technical hear about it?
|
| If you assume that mapping services on a low-to-no
| bandwidth connection are important to them, they'll hear
| about it through word of mouth. Anything that solves a
| real problem will spread that way.
|
| Contrapositively, we can conclude that mapping isn't much
| of a problem for these people.
| hedora wrote:
| Here's my favorite example of this:
|
| https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/
|
| When the power's out and broadband is down, if you are
| lucky the cell network is still up. However, _everyone_
| fails over to it simultaneously, so there 's no way
| you'll get 2G speeds out of your 5G plan with 5 bars.
|
| I throttled my browser dev tools to 2G and clicked
| reload. After 2+ minutes, it popped up a "It looks like
| you are on a slow connection" modal (sometimes this loads
| on top of the outage info, obscuring the data you want!),
| so I clicked "Use low bandwidth version". After 51
| seconds, the debugger says page load is finished (for the
| low bandwidth one), but the page is just a white
| background, and the browser "loading" animation is still
| running.
|
| After 2.17 more minutes, I get a form where you can type
| in an address + a bunch of irrelevant info. I typed an
| address, waited a minute, then typed this paragraph.
| After 1.5 minutes, it showed my address in the
| autocomplete menu, and I clicked it.
|
| 33 seconds later, it started loading a google maps ajax.
| 47 seconds after that, it displayed a header, with a
| white body. 1.33 minutes later, ignoring styling, it
| returned the string "power is on".
|
| (No map, etc, at this point.)
|
| Had this been a real outage in a storm, I'd be standing
| outside in the rain, or in a situation where getting cell
| coverage for more than 30 seconds at a time is impossible
| if you're holding the phone. I usually just put the phone
| on a carefully placed chair, then back away slowly.
|
| Anyway it takes 9 minutes under ideal scenarios (no
| drops) to send 30 bytes of address, and an 11 byte
| response. 44 bytes / 540 seconds = 0.08 bytes per second
| good put.
|
| For reference, voyager can send 20 bytes per second, so
| it's 250x faster than this. Morse code / telegraphs are
| typically sent at 1.5 words per minute, where a word is
| 15 characters, so 0.375 bytes per second = 4.6x faster.
|
| Remember, these are simulated conditions for the PG&E
| site. My record best time getting it to load during a
| major outage is 45 minutes, not 9.
| cozzyd wrote:
| I remember 10+ years ago I had to do my on-boarding
| paperwork from a research station on the Greenland ice
| sheet. Workday would just not work with the high latency
| (but otherwise, not terribly slow) connection. I had to
| remote desktop to a CONUS computer and use a browser
| there in order for it to work...
| smelendez wrote:
| In my experience, a slow connection can be less usable
| for some apps than none at all.
|
| If there's no connection or you're in airplane mode, some
| apps will let you access locally stored/cached data, but
| as soon as there's a bad connection, they'll wipe that
| data by trying to unsuccessfully refresh it from the
| server.
| nathanmills wrote:
| This is an easy fix: Just cut off their data after it
| runs out instead of falling back to 2G speeds. Sounds
| like a win-win for both the data provider and the user.
| TheDong wrote:
| I hope you're joking.
|
| The obvious easy fix is to give them unlimited data. If
| the intent is to give them internet, they should give
| them internet that functions for the modern web.
| nathanmills wrote:
| Unlimited data! You make it sound so easy.
| asdff wrote:
| It was seemingly easy for every cell provider to give it
| to every teenager in america just 10 years ago. What is a
| few marginalized adults in 2026?
| lazide wrote:
| They won't be marginalized if we don't shit on them
| _somehow_.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Unless we nut up and ban gambling, there will never be a
| shortage of broke motherfuckers who should be able to
| make ends meet with their job but simply never will be
| able to. You have no idea how badly gambling suppresses a
| large subset of the working class.
| bjoli wrote:
| I dont think most people here see that, or even have the
| willingness to see that. The same was true for the opioid
| epidemic. Had it hit a group with any political capital
| there would have been laws passed and the sacklers would
| have been not just painted as villains, they would have
| been castrated a quarter of a century ago.
|
| Just wait 15 years when the middle class has been
| struggling with easily accessible gambling and it can't
| be explained as problem of character. There will be laws
| passed and people prosecuted or successfully sued.
| lazide wrote:
| Many of those targeted by the sacklers did start as
| white, middle class, etc. or even white, upper class.
|
| Those folks that did fall to it, then became (often)
| lower class while failing to it.
|
| The thing to realize, is that the upper classes 'eat
| their own' just like any other. It's why Trump is as
| frantic as he is, he knows what will happen when he stops
| being 'useful'/necessary.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| I'm not really affected by it yet (I've been able to
| resist gambling more than a self-imposed $20 at a time,
| which I can afford, and one time I realized I wanted to
| break my limit, I realized it was an important moment to
| nut up and walk away). But I understand that there are
| people it's really affecting. So I'm all in favor of "NO
| more gambling".
|
| But even if that wasn't a thing - the way it's ruined
| watching sports now, with the constant odds flashing,
| etc, I'd ban it JUST for that, on top of all the
| detrimental effects on society.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Which, as a reminder, was the status quo just a decade or
| so ago.
|
| I don't remember "I can't throw money away on this
| football play" being a massive society wide problem that
| needed fixing in 2010, pretty sure everyone could bet
| with their friends already.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| What's more, betting with friends is vastly less harmful
| than betting at casinos (digital or otherwise.) When you
| bet with friends, your loss is their gain and their loss
| is your gain, the money more or less sticks around, the
| community as a whole isn't impoverished by it. But when
| people are gambling away their days wages playing rigged
| slot machines on their phone, that money might as well
| have been set on fire. It goes into the pockets of
| investors who might as well be on the other side of the
| planet and in the long run it will never be won back. The
| community as a whole is impoverished by this kind of
| gambling.
| hackpelican wrote:
| I hope you're still joking.
|
| Data caps are to an extent "fake", in that telcos' costs
| aren't measured in how many bytes their customers
| download/upload. Telcos' costs come from renting
| bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is
| constant.
|
| And for popular websites, they will cache lots of content
| on their own network or peer directly with data centers
| so they don't have to pay for the bandwidth there. The
| routers will continue routing and the switches will
| continue switching whether you download 5GBs or 5TBs.
|
| One more way to understand how much of a scam mobile data
| caps are, is that the same ISP will sell you unlimited
| fiber plans even though essentially your traffic goes
| through the same backbone.
|
| Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell
| towers, but they don't need to be as low as they are
| today.
| encom wrote:
| Didn't https everywhere ruin caching? Unless you MITM
| everyone like CloudFlare.
| codebje wrote:
| https-everywhere does indeed prevent transparent proxying
| by ISPs. Mostly this isn't an issue: site owners are less
| likely to have their content tampered with by a content
| distribution network than by an ISP, and have full
| control over which CDN(s) are allowed to act on their
| behalf. Larger content providers operate their own CDNs,
| of course.
|
| In the case of TFA, PC Gamer isn't directly consuming the
| bandwidth with their own servers on their own domain
| name. It's an ad distribution network doing that, and
| odds are reasonable they're already colocated someplace
| with your ISP and the bandwidth consumed by ads is
| totally irrelevant to everyone except the poor sap at the
| home end of the last mile.
| happymellon wrote:
| > Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell
| towers
|
| Data caps make congestion worse, because you are more
| likely to restrict where you use data and people are
| predictable. You'll no longer use bits everywhere because
| you care less, you'll use it where everyone else does.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Telcos' costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1
| and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.
|
| In the long run, all costs are variable. Phone companies
| lack the bandwidth to provide all their customers
| unlimited data all the time. Most of them can't even
| provide full speeds to their existing customers at peak
| times. If they gave everyone unlimited data they'd have
| to get more bandwidth, and they'd pass on every penny of
| the cost.
| what wrote:
| They're already given unlimited data? It just gets
| throttled the 2G speeds.
|
| They can also just go to the local library or Starbucks
| for the WiFi if they need more.
| TheDong wrote:
| 2G speeds isn't really full access to "the internet" for
| some parts of the internet.
|
| My experience with 2G speeds is:
|
| 1. Open job application site
|
| 2. Upload resume pdf
|
| 3. Upload required picture of ID
|
| 4. Server's nginx config has a hard-coded timeout after 1
| minute. Connection error
|
| 5. Try to upload again
|
| 6. Connection error
|
| A huge number of pieces of the web have hardcoded
| timeouts and limits designed to stop slowloris style
| attacks, and if your connection is slow enough, those
| will prevent you from ever being able to complete some
| tasks.
| coryrc wrote:
| You'll need to go to the library then, if you can't
| manage to watch your data use and use your free phone
| only for important usage.
|
| I've paid for 2GB/mo for years now. I think I ran out
| once.
| lukevp wrote:
| This thread is about how a static text article loaded 500
| megs in the background. How would someone prepare for
| that exactly? This is effectively malware as far as your
| bandwidth is concerned.
| mr_toad wrote:
| I've used travel SIMs that only give you about 5GB. You
| avoid using the web at all, unless you are on WiFi. You
| can use maps, train and bus apps, banking apps,
| messaging, AirBnB etc, but not the web. If you go to some
| place and they want to use a QR code to buy a ticket or
| use a menu you may as well forget about it.
| cozzyd wrote:
| With a pay as you go google fi plan... the trick is to
| use firefox + uBO. If a site opens in the default Android
| web view, you're fucked.
| type0 wrote:
| I tried to explain slow loris to a non technical friend,
| he thought I was joking. The concept of the internet in
| this day and age is very "cloudy" for a regular user, all
| pun intended.
| virtue3 wrote:
| Please go try and do anything on the internet at 2G
| speeds in todays world.
|
| You can barely even use FB messenger (you need to get
| messenger-lite).
|
| I only know this cuz tmobile would give you free 2g all
| over europe. it was JUST BARELY helpful. mostly just sms
| and email.
|
| google maps was unusable etc. This only got worse over
| the years.
|
| They now give you free 3G and it's bearable. 2G is
| insanely slow in the 2020+ world.
|
| 2G ~= 5 KB/s. That means 40 seconds just to download a
| properly optimized react bundle.
|
| 5MB site? 16+ minutes.
| medvidek wrote:
| > They now give you free 3G and it's bearable
|
| Note that many European countries have already got rid of
| their 3G networks completely [0]. So it's either "you
| have 4G/5G" or "the internet is pretty much unusable",
| nothing in between.
|
| As someone living in a European country with no 3G
| network, my experience with mobile data is that when my
| phone fails to find a 4G signal and switches to 2G
| (pretty much only happens in remote areas, thankfully), I
| can as well send my packets using a pigeon carrier,
| they're going to arrive to the destination sooner.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G#Phase-out
| lostlogin wrote:
| Add New Zealand to the places that have turned off 3G.
| zyx321 wrote:
| Not really relevant here, because it's not real 2G/3G,
| but 4G throttled to 2G speed.
| lukevp wrote:
| People on government assistance are just casually going
| to Starbucks for free wifi? They probably don't even have
| a reliable way to get around. Let them eat cake?
| jerf wrote:
| There's a very wide band between "2G" and "unlimited" to
| explore.
|
| Cell phone systems already have some tiering built in, at
| least based on the fine print I've read about my plans.
| Once I run out of "official data" I fall back to low-
| priority usage, but the cell system is generally so well-
| provisioned nowadays that I hardly notice. In 2026, one
| must take explicit action to force people back to 2G.
| Nothing would stop these plans from, say, simply _always_
| being "low priority usage" but at full speed, and for
| the most part this would satisfy everyone.
|
| This sort of clause reeks of "it was written into a
| contract 15 years ago and nobody has even so much as
| thought about it since then" rather than some sort of
| choice.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Publicly provided wifi would also help them and everyone.
| But of course, guess who's fighting real hard against
| that...
| 9864247888754 wrote:
| Why don't you pay for it?
| throwingcookies wrote:
| Not sure if you are aware that with throttled 2G slow you
| can't even open a package tracking website these days,
| because the connection times out before you have
| downloaded all their asset dependencies. And those kind
| of websites do not support resumes of downloads (or
| partial content requests).
|
| So you're stuck in a loop of not being able to use the
| web because the websites keep downloading stuff you don't
| need.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It's only usable for a limited number of sites that still
| work with most JS and images blocked (and of course no
| video ads). I doubt many tech illiterates are aware of
| how to constrain their data usage on the web or avoid AAA
| apps with obscene volumes of data transfer. Another issue
| is it's not just 2G but also heavily deprioritized.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| How are they supposed to know which job search platforms
| (app or web) aren't going to blow their bandwidth limits?
| tbossanova wrote:
| True, and also when you actually go to apply for a job it
| often kicks you out to another website, that will use who
| knows how many mbs? And you have to fill in your details
| again and again. Each one a different flavour. Sometimes
| saying the same thing multiple times for the same job ad.
| type0 wrote:
| Non technical people are afraid to block adds on their
| Android device since Google might find out about it and
| decides to eliminate their account; I was not able to
| convince them otherwise.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| For those who can't understand this comment, here is what
| it means:
|
| "I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? 10
| dollars?"
| jama211 wrote:
| lol, right?
| DrewADesign wrote:
| If 2G speeds were what they were when it was heavily
| used? Sure. Nowadays? Not in my experience. I got
| downgraded to Google Fi's 2G in a well-traveled part of
| Virginia using a flagship Samsung and I couldn't even
| load directions on Google Maps where I'd already
| downloaded most of the map for offline use. 2G ain't like
| it used to be when it was still given a second thought by
| providers.
| microtonal wrote:
| It's not only the providers. 2G is 120kbit max on a lot
| of networks and 50kbit on average. Even a 1MB site, that
| is lean by today's standards will take 160 seconds to
| load.
|
| 2G is really from a different age. Does anyone remember
| WAP and i-mode? I was certainly not able to afford data
| back then, but that is what all the business'y types were
| raving about.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Yeah that's true -- 2G was in the WAP days. Forgot about
| that.
| palmotea wrote:
| > If someone needs a phone like this for email and job
| searching and has no other option, 2G speeds will work.
|
| 2G EDGE was 384 kbit/s (48 kB/s)
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G). That means 21 seconds
| to download a 1 MB page.
|
| I just loaded the careers page at my employer, and the
| page weighed in at 3.6 MB, so you're talking 75 seconds.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| sounds like someone never tried connection that slow on
| modern sites
| iberator wrote:
| 2G (EDGE, EDGE+) doesn't allow you to do a job search.
|
| In reality this is like 16kb with speeds similar to 56k
| modem. No modern JS website works. Ssh, irc works and
| thats about it. Modern stuff like certificates also slows
| it down.
|
| I'm talking here about real life - not some emulated 2G
| in your browser.
| 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.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Not using it at home likely discounts a lot of personal
| consumption. If you can get your fill at nights, less
| need to access the internet during the day.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I've had a 1GB/mo $5/mo plan from good2go for the last 2
| years. I've never gone over it. But that's because I go
| from wifi to wifi all the time and I'm very careful when
| I'm on cell. That definitely doesn't work for most
| people!
| benatkin wrote:
| If you're highly tech literate, you can get by with 4GB
| or even 3GB.
|
| What you cannot do, contrary to what someone posted in
| this thread, is get by on 2G. So an ounce of prevention
| is worth a pound of cure in this case.
| hedora wrote:
| I used to be able to get away with this by downloading
| music, podcasts and maps at home.
|
| During the iOS 26 upgrade cycle, iOS deleted all my
| third-party map apps and then expired the locally
| downloaded apple maps. My phone also somehow lost my
| downloaded podcasts + music a few times, but, unlike
| losing three offline map applications, that didn't strand
| me in the middle of the woods with no cell coverage and
| no maps.
|
| I agree that 4GB (or even 1GB) goes very far with a
| working phone OS though.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| I arrived in a small airport at midnight. Served only by
| Uber. Since I use Lyft elsewhere, my phone had deleted
| the Uber app. It took 15 minutes to download that: crappy
| Wifi and some kind of 5G dead zone. Sometimes you really
| need to download the app.
| 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!
| novaleaf wrote:
| crazy solution that might work for you: open an incognito
| browser and check for deals for new customers. "someone"
| I know was able to switch from a $50/1.2TB limited
| 300mbit plan to a $45/unlimited 1Gbit plan doing this.
|
| if they have a better deal for new users: sign up for a
| new account under someone else in your household, and
| cancel your old account after you get your new account
| hardware setup and working.
| tw04 wrote:
| Calling them ewaste is a little dramatic. While sites like
| this are a cancer, there is free WiFi in basically every
| town in America. You can get data for free, even if it's
| slightly inconvenient.
| bsammon wrote:
| I think you may be a bit out of date. There _was_ free
| WiFi in basically every town. Now it 's frequently a
| vestigial, no-longer-maintained free WiFi that works like
| crap, because there's no maintenance, because "everyone
| has cellular data nowadays".
| tw04 wrote:
| Every public library in the US has free wifi. Every
| Starbucks in the US has free wifi. Every public school
| has free wifi.
|
| I can tell you don't actually have to use it because if
| you did you'd know your statement isn't accurate.
| neutronicus wrote:
| I was gonna say - the public library wifi is up to this
| task.
| bsammon wrote:
| Actually, this is based on my personal experience. I
| don't use a smartphone for internet. Many of the places
| where I've tried it, the "free wifi" doesn't work. Maybe
| the wifi is there, but the uplink is 2G speed, or it has
| a web sign-in that doesn't work any more. Or maybe an
| employee accidentally unplugged the router. Days/weeks
| ago. And "no one complained about it".
|
| I've traveled Greyhound and Amtrak recently. They both
| advertise free wifi, but it's quite clear they no longer
| prioritize keeping it working.
|
| Libraries are (probably/hopefully) an exception. But,
| seeing as Starbucks has been wanting to discourage people
| from hanging out in recent months, I wouldn't count on
| Starbucks wifi being reliable.
| joshuacc wrote:
| Nope. Virtually every fast food restaurant has free wifi,
| to say nothing of public libraries. It's more common now
| than it ever was previously.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It was a bit dramatic, but I've seen these guys just
| leave these phones behind once the data is gone. They're
| not likely to carry it around for the next 27 days until
| the data is refreshed. They'll generally just hustle for
| $10 to bribe the phone agent to bypass the SSN check and
| give them another fresh phone.
|
| The issue is that the wifi isn't available where they
| need it. If I send them to the SSA building to get some
| federal docs, it's in a dead zone. It might be in the
| middle of Chicago but there isn't any free wifi for a
| mile in any direction from there. How do they pull up
| Google Maps to get home? And it's not always obvious how
| to get the free wifi as it doesn't just let you connect,
| you had to go through a multi-step process of signing in
| and accepting T&Cs these days. Which the phone doesn't
| always want to do.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| Here in NZ, a lot of people live with less than 1GB of
| mobile data / month. Once you run out, you have to pay per
| MB at extortionate rates.
|
| Most people still use sms rather than RCS or Signal or
| anything secure so they don't have to pay for the data
| (most plans have unlimited SMS now)
|
| Of course, the whole country has ultra-fast fibre on
| unmetered connections (even on the very cheapest plans), so
| if you're at work or home it's fine. Just using data on the
| go is a non-starter for many
| hedora wrote:
| Years ago (before the fiber landed) we hit this problem
| in NZ, but could generally find ridiculously throttled
| WiFi somewhere.
|
| Presumably, that's fast now, right? I'm surprised people
| don't just lean heavily on it instead of the
| (mismanaged?) cell network.
| bandrami wrote:
| As someone living in a non-net-neutral country this really
| is the big advantage everybody in net-neutral-land ignores:
| Meta and Google pay for nearly all of my data use (one of
| them even seems to cover HN).
| account42 wrote:
| Meta and Google aren't the ones paying in the end, you
| are - just indirectly.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I've worked with a lot of people at the bottom end of
| society in the USA.
|
| In adtech?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I have a 8gb plan and don't go out of my way to connect to
| wifi everywhere I go. 3 is almost a third of that, but I
| don't spend it all every month.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Normies don't have good intuition for the size of
| different kinds of data. They'll stream Netflix for a few
| hours then genuinely wonder how they hit their data limit
| because they "weren't even using the internet."
| psychoslave wrote:
| Talking about (electronic-)waste, what's choking is how
| much resources are required to do the same or less than
| what used to be possible with far more humble hardware and
| bandwidth, all that in living memory.
|
| Sure part of "software fills space like a gas" can be
| explained by "got to go fast to stay ahead on the market",
| but at some point it's blatant negligence of frugality
| where it's providing overall economical benefits.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > it's blatant negligence of frugality where it's
| providing overall economical benefits.
|
| Recently tried to alter a phone plan on EE's website,
| something that should have involved a few clicks. It was
| slow (literal seconds to open a page) and clunky. The
| Javascript console was bleeding error messages, and it
| looked like they'd used every Javascript framework under
| the sun. And after all that it just gave me an error
| message saying that the transaction could not be
| processed.
|
| Gave up and texted (old school SMS) their help line. With
| a few text messages I was able to change plans. Probably
| used under 500 bytes to accomplish what the bloated and
| broken website couldn't.
| mapt wrote:
| I think a basic principle with limited plans that offer
| the ability to buy extra data is "You should be able to
| actually load the account platform at the 2G hobbled
| speeds in order to pay". The heavyweight website/app for
| the mobile network, combined with the use of a phone
| number-tied Android login as primary login credential
| rather than a user account, it meant that the only way to
| actually get 4G back online was to have access to wifi on
| the phone in the place & time you needed to re-up; If I
| did have that access at work, I wouldn't need the data.
|
| Despite years of being too lazy/anxious to figure out
| phone number portability, I ultimately ended up switching
| carriers from Simple to Mint because it was just too
| annoying.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I know at least on att prepaid they don't meter their own
| websites, if you have completely used your data up you
| can still access the website at normal speeds to change
| plans and stuff
| throw10920 wrote:
| What does "negligence of fugality" even mean here?
|
| There's _dozens_ of things to optimize for in software
| development, with resource usage being only a few of them
| (as CPU, memory, and network are different targets). Who
| are you to decide which are the most important? And if
| you think that you can do a better job at picking the
| right trades while keeping companies in business, then
| you would be able to make a _lot_ of money doing so.
|
| But you won't. The actual reason why companies (and even
| personal and open-source software projects) make these
| "wasteful" design decisions is because _normal users have
| clearly indicated their priorities_. The majority of
| people would rather trade some performance for a
| "modern" web design, and have heavy videos rather than
| lightweight text to give a product overview, and want
| that one particular feature that adds cat ears to their
| profile photo and if the competition has it they'll
| switch.
|
| Do I think these priorities are wrong and stupid?
| _Absolutely._ I _hate_ bloated web pages and slow
| applications. But empirically, with billions of dollars
| of evidence, these are decisions driven by _users ' and
| customers' priorities_.
|
| Look at sites built for professionals, like Digikey and
| McMaster-Carr - far better designed and more performant,
| because they cater to customers that _care about those
| things_.
|
| It's extremely obvious what users prioritize. And if you
| think that "they don't know what's best for them, but I
| do" - what makes you any better than a member of the
| economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >The actual reason why companies (and even personal and
| open-source software projects) make these "wasteful"
| design decisions is because normal users have clearly
| indicated their priorities.
|
| You really think it's the _users_ asking for bloated
| webpages? Reddit has been pushing their reddit redesign
| forever now. No users ever asked for it. There is a large
| community of users that insist on using the old.reddit
| interface, and reddit has been chipping away by slowly
| breaking more and more things (most recently, the mod
| page).
|
| Compare that with hacker news or craig's list. They're
| still super light weight, fit for purpose, and I am
| forever thankful the webdevs (dang,etc) responsible for
| them did not succumb to the temptation to 'web 2.0/SPA'
| it.
|
| It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's
| marketing folks. See also, how nobody builds 'starter'
| homes anymore. There's a huge unmet market for it, but
| homebuilders find building mcMansions to be more
| profitable, so that's what gets built.
| afavour wrote:
| How are users choosing this stuff? Do you have an example
| of two competing services offering the same features, one
| bloated and one not, and users locked to the bloated one?
|
| To my mind users are simply using what's put in front of
| them. They lack the technical knowledge to know better
| things are possible and even if they did they don't have
| any way to advocate for it. Over half of US users use an
| ad blocker:
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker
| /
|
| That alone suggests to me that when given a choice users
| actually _do_ care.
| psychoslave wrote:
| >would be able to make a lot of money doing so.
|
| That's precisely the elephant in the room. Money is a
| distortion and filtering lense that makes obvious things
| look inexistent until the wall it renders invisible is
| hit -- at high the highest speed it could reach before
| that.
|
| Reality is extremely poorly summarized within the frame
| of a single scalar value.
|
| >And if you think that "they don't know what's best for
| them, but I do" - what makes you any better than a member
| of the economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?
|
| First of all, there no necessity to go into a you/I or
| them/us mindset. Also it's not because some group don't
| know what's best for themselves that any other group will
| know better -- whatever the label given the this other
| group: "I" or "too-big-to-fail Inc.".
|
| This whole message also seem to assume some kind of full
| rationalization based on user priorities. But user base
| to a large extent takes what's the most obviously thrown
| at their face. They sometime can tweak their applications
| if it does give some options to do so, or switch to some
| alternative if there are not trapped in a defacto
| oligopoly.
|
| Do people want LLMs thrown at their face at every single
| corner of their digital interactions? Or is the the
| "throw it at every single surface indiscriminately and
| see what stick" driven by the hope that something will
| stick and make the capital venture lottery produce a few
| winner take it all?
| lxgr wrote:
| > Who are you to decide which are the most important?
|
| The customer.
| Someone wrote:
| > These phones come with 3GB of regular data per month.
| [...] Three days into the month these phones are just
| ewaste.
|
| Are you saying using 1GB of data a day on a smartphone is
| normal for smartphone users? I have a 10GB plan not because
| I need it (looking at this year, 2GB would be more than
| sufficient) but because that's about the lowest I can get
| nowadays.
|
| Certainly if, as indicated, the intent is for these users
| to have a phone for essentials, not for watching YouTube or
| playing music, 3 GB, IMO, should be sufficient.
| jon-wood wrote:
| My phone also reports as only having used a couple of
| gigabytes of mobile data each month but that's because
| most of the time I'm using it attached to wifi at home or
| work. The people being given free phone plans by the
| government probably don't have a home internet
| connection, that 3GB of data will be the only access they
| have outside of finding a library that's somehow still
| funded, or paying for a drink to use coffee shop wifi.
|
| Maybe YouTube or listening to music aren't strictly
| essentials but they also don't seem like absurd luxuries
| that we should be arbitrarily denying to people in 2026
| to save a few cents per user on what I assume is a set of
| bulk purchased SIMs.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > finding a library that's somehow still funded
|
| Libraries just got an increase in funding in the US in
| the 2026 appropriations bills.
|
| > Maybe YouTube or listening to music aren't strictly
| essentials but they also don't seem like absurd luxuries
| that we should be arbitrarily denying to people in 2026
|
| No-one's arbitrarily denying things. It's about what
| should and shouldn't be given as free things that other
| people work to pay for.
| bjoli wrote:
| Libraries haven't gotten much since 2009 except for huge
| costs for digital licensing.
|
| Ebook publishers are scamming the libraries. I shit you
| not, but over something like 4 years an ebook can be 10x
| the cost.
| philipallstar wrote:
| It's just such a crazy idea to lend ebooks.
| bccdee wrote:
| "It's UNFAIR!" is the anthem of whiny children. If these
| people would benefit from access to Youtube, and we can
| provide it to them trivially, then by all means, let them
| have it. If it upsets you when people are given things
| for free, that's really a "you problem."
| prmoustache wrote:
| How so? Aren't there any public wifi anymore?
|
| My daughter also has a 3GB data plan but she knows to only
| use whatsapp when she isn't connected to a Wifi network and
| we configured it to not auto load the photos and videos
| when on mobile data.
| cozzyd wrote:
| this is why Firefox with uBO is basically a requirement to
| browse mobile internet.
| al_borland wrote:
| Even with good bandwidth and unlimited data, it's still
| disrespectful.
| wildzzz wrote:
| I wonder how much money is wasted just transmitting ads
| over the internet. Like I get websites are getting paid for
| displaying them but imagine how much cheaper things would
| be if ads weren't jacking up demands for bandwidth.
| MBCook wrote:
| Now that we have auto play video ads? Most of it.
| TheDong wrote:
| It's not wasted bandwidth; we've reached this level of
| ads because brands have realized that brainwashing the
| populace via ads to make them want their brand is cheaper
| than building a better product, so the bandwidth is a
| small price to pay for brainwashing people.
|
| If we didn't have ads, people would not only need less
| bandwidth, they'd buy less physical junk, and quite
| possibly be happier for it.
| drnick1 wrote:
| Estimates suggest that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all
| Internet users in the U.S. use an ad blocker.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Money wasted by the user on a data contract is a gain for
| the carrier.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| That's a low bar. Like crypto mining for the power
| company or throwing extra food out at the end of the day
| is revenue for the trash pickup company!
| saghm wrote:
| Agreed, this is almost a textbook example of the Parable
| of the Broken Window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabl
| e_of_the_broken_window
| hohithere wrote:
| Agreed, my data plan don't approve these kind of pages.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| This also partially explains why my phone sometimes gets hot
| and uses a double digit of battery randomly when using the
| browser if it's streaming video in multiple divs
| 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.
| robrain wrote:
| Settings, Accessibility, Motion, switch off Auto-Play preview
| videos is supposed to do the trick for System Apps (including
| messages, safari etc).
|
| Untested since I run my phone via Wireguard to my home
| network and block everything there.
| SenHeng wrote:
| I've always wondered about this, does it stop downloading
| the video when it stops playing?
|
| My guess is no.
| lapcat wrote:
| This is incorrect. The setting does not apply to Safari.
| It's for App Store, for example.
| robrain wrote:
| Now tested - you're right
| Marsymars wrote:
| StopTheMadness will do this pretty well for $15.
| xnx wrote:
| Does cache turn off when the Chrome network panel is open?
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| It does when the "disable caches" checkbox is checked, as it
| is in that screenshot.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Streaming video of the website would take less than browsing
| the website
| arghwhat wrote:
| Could also be looping videos - some browsers had bugs whereby
| looping videos would continously redownload.
|
| I recall some years back having corporate IT ask me why I was
| downloading terabytes off this weird website called "imgur"
| that they didn't know about. Realized I had a tab open with a
| stupid jackie chan mp4 a few seconds long on some background
| workspace, and that had just kept downloading over and over and
| over and over...
| 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:
| I'm honestly amazed they tried that. It's been so long,
| it felt like a play to cache in on the name but I feel
| like a huge chunk of people don't really remember it or
| weren't even around for it.
| 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.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I've never seen that. That's terrible. The people who put
| up with streaming enshittification are ruining it for the
| rest of us by normalizing it.
| vel0city wrote:
| To be fair, this was almost a decade ago.
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| They just doubled the "get out of watching ads" fee. Also,
| most of their good content is now in the "Now playing"
| section, where you can't seek around or choose episodes. Of
| course, it also has unskippable ads, even if you paid to
| remove them.
|
| I strongly recommend purchasing a USB bluray player + then
| buying shiny metal disks to feed it (or finding your public
| library, of course!)
|
| Used + overstock disks are << $10. I go to the store and
| grab what I want. I typically leave with about 30 movies /
| TV seasons for $100. They're far higher quality than the
| content that is included with amazon prime, and typically
| cost about 10% as much as the "buy movie" price for the
| same film.
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| ...and that whoever is running HN sees that they are the #5
| raised, and #5 pinned site.
| 1bpp wrote:
| Funny to see w3schools.com ranking above Twitter.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I'm hoping/dreaming it would be browser-standard, as a
| protocol. Kagi would be one of the reputation providers in
| that scheme.
| robotnikman wrote:
| I remember in the 2000's there was a site that did exactly
| this. I can't remember the name now though, maybe someone else
| will know what I'm talking about.
| 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)
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > What is your screen resolution ?
|
| 1920 x 1080 @ 100%
|
| > I guess you're using a retina-like display ?
|
| I don't think so. It's a T14 Gen 2a.
| nxtbl wrote:
| Results appear to vary. 2.5-3.4MB with 2560x1600
| resolution. Firefox + uBlock + uMatrix + DDG essentials.
| ui301 wrote:
| You mean Ublock, not Unlock, I assume?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| You are correct. Sorry for the typo.
|
| I think Firefox just rolled out some kind of autocomplete; I
| haven't compensated yet.
| never_inline wrote:
| UBO also let's you limit attachment size. Eg you can configure
| it to block anything larger than 100KB. Not sure what it does
| without Content-Length header though.
| 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.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I mean.
| 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.
| tolerance wrote:
| At this rate society is going to slowly politicize every
| profession to the point that the only approved positions will
| be under a respective party's ministry.
| troad wrote:
| Yeah, let's try not to make a habit of punishing people
| making subsistence wages for the sins of the corporate elite.
|
| If you're making half a mil designing spyware for Palantir,
| different story.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| This is such an extreme reach.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Readers don't care. Customers don't care about the internal
| details of the company.
| sunaookami wrote:
| As if the so called journos are any better with the absolute
| garbage they write for that site.
| 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.
| abustamam wrote:
| The casual user likely doesn't know what an ad blocker
| is, and many who do likely have one of those ad blockers
| that may reduce the number of ads displayed but collect
| everything about your browsing habits.
|
| It's very likely that ad providers expect that.
| joquarky wrote:
| They need to have more ads so that they can afford to pay
| for the bandwidth used by all of 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.
| edoloughlin wrote:
| And that's fine because that photo (probably) has some
| utility to you.
|
| The 39.99MB of ads accompanying the 2KB of text you want to
| read possibly has less utility to you.
| jojobas wrote:
| As you might be aware, you're not the one paying for it so
| your utility is not really on the table.
|
| Also consider the utility of an ad blocker.
| toast0 wrote:
| A lot of people are paying for their data. If a web page
| uses 40 mb and you have 4GB of data quota per month, you
| can only load 100 pages per month. Apparently the article
| text describes the page actually using 500 MB over 5
| minutes, which means a 4GB quota can be used for less
| than an hour of reading.
|
| Maybe it's different if advertisers or publishers are
| paying viewer's data costs. But some amount of restraint
| might be nice. Personally, I don't use a lot on my phone
| when I'm out and about, other than chat apps, hn, text
| NPR and lite CNN, cause I used to be on a plan with a
| hard cutoff. But then, I have unmetered networking at
| home.
| jojobas wrote:
| I mean, the utility that matters is the utility for PC
| Gamer of showing everyone the ads vs some people refusing
| to read them over data concerns.
|
| You might be paying for data, but you're not paying PC
| Gamer for reading them, so your opinion only starts to
| matter when you quit reading them over how much data they
| use.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| A reader who hits their mobile data cap after thirty
| minutes on your site will not be viewing any more of your
| ads for the next month. But if businesses were capable of
| thinking more than exactly one step ahead for any action
| they take, the tech industry wouldn't be such a shithole
| in the first place, of course.
| jojobas wrote:
| I don't think what these websites are doing is "good",
| but I can't see them stopping any time soon.
| toast0 wrote:
| I imagine people remember what site they were on when the
| data usage warnings came up, and they don't come back.
|
| The question I guess is really if PC Gamer earns more by
| sending 100 mb / minute and chasing some eyeballs away
| faster, than by using a reasonable amount of data and
| losing eyeballs at the normal rate of attrition for
| written word outlets.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| If anything ads on page built like that will make sure I
| won't buy that particular product ever
| hedora wrote:
| Careful what you call "low resolution": Windows 3.11 runs
| beautifully at 1600x1200 in dosbox in HIDPI mode.
|
| 1600x1200 is limited to 256 colors. However, you can still
| get up to 16-24bit at higher resolutions than many modern
| Win11 laptops support.
| gertop wrote:
| Fair enough, let's use dvd rips as a metric instead. They
| tend to begin at 700MB.
|
| So by reading this article on PC gamer you've now downloaded
| the equivalent of a full-length movie worth of low quality
| code and ads.
| dxdm wrote:
| 700MB, that's a CD. ~70 minutes of music, uncompressed.
|
| A DVD (single layer) holds about 4.7GB of data.
| My_Name wrote:
| You can easily get compressed episodes of a TV show that
| are 250MB, so it's like watching a TV series at the rate
| of 2 episodes every 5 minutes. Obviously better quality
| is in the range 500MB-1.5GB for a 45-minute episode, so
| even being generous it's 20 minutes of compressed TV or
| 70 minutes of uncompressed music every 5 minutes.
|
| Just for ads on a website.
| qwery wrote:
| Yes, as I understand it, the ~700 MiB "standard" was
| derived from the capacity of a CD. A rip is
| definitionally a copy that lacks some of the original
| data of the source media.
| Aurornis wrote:
| DVDs were in the 4-5GB range.
|
| 700MB "rips" are heavily compressed with modern codecs.
| 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.
| vitaflo wrote:
| Windows XP install disk is 600 MB, so pretty close to that on
| this website already.
| qmr wrote:
| Mind maze!
| zahlman wrote:
| Put another way, the initial page would barely fit (by itself)
| on the first hard drive I ever used.
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| Yeah, those are rather large for those of us not on retina
| displays.
|
| (Is 3150x2210 a normal resolution / aspect ratio for those,
| anyway?)
| hedora wrote:
| 3150x2210 is sort of a normal resolution for retina displays.
| It's close to a native panel resolution on iOS, but they do
| this dumb fractional scaling thing because it was too hard to
| backport support for high DPI displays to MacOS X. Anyway,
| that resolution is so unreadable on current macos that they
| hide it behind a "show all resolutions" toggle. The default
| is 50% that (1/4 as many pixels), and they only let you go up
| to about 60-66% of native resolution unless you click the
| override.
|
| So, the screenshot is probably a semi-upscaled image of a ~
| 1920x1200 desktop.
| zahlman wrote:
| What's with the aspect ratio, though?
| 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.
| coryrc wrote:
| Hello time traveler! Um, there's a pandemic coming with 2020.
| Buy the dip, stocks are going to skyrocket for at least 5
| years.
| 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
| nickburns wrote:
| NoScript is the standard for this, with uBlock Origin being
| something like its 'spiritual successor'.
|
| I run both side-by-side.
|
| https://github.com/hackademix/noscript
|
| https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
| 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 ...
| hackable_sand wrote:
| It's not
| nathanmills wrote:
| It is
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Not on mobile
|
| I used to use NextDNS a lot but some things would get messed up
| so I'd have to sometimes disable it and then I got lazy and
| just have kept it off for like a year
|
| On Android is there a better solution when using Chrome?
| CarVac wrote:
| Not using Chrome. Mobile Firefox has adblocking on Android.
| hedora wrote:
| On iOS, you can use Orion by Kagi, which is webkit-based,
| but supports Firefox plugins. UBlock Origin for Firefox
| works well there too.
| stodor89 wrote:
| Or Brave. Or AdGuard.
| rahidz wrote:
| yeah I got a lifetime license for Adguard (no affiliation) &
| been using that for three years now - it's been great.
| jemmyw wrote:
| Almost any other browser. I've used Firefox and Brave on
| Android with adblocking
| Marsymars wrote:
| uBlock Origin Lite is probably the best option, but in my
| experience mobile adblocking goes Firefox (with uBlock
| Origin) > Safari (with 1Blocker) > Chrome (with uBlock Origin
| Lite).
|
| edit: Erp, actually, it seems mobile Chrome doesn't have
| extension support. I only actually use Chrome on a
| Chromebook, I assumed Android was comparable.
| Markoff wrote:
| Firefox supports extensions (uBlock Origin, Video Background
| Play Fix - these two are enough for me)
|
| most of the browsers have built-in adblockers, but I would
| suggest to stay way from browsers not supporting extensions
|
| other browsers with (limited) extension support on Android -
| Edge (MS), Yandex (RU), Quetta (CN), Kiwi browser
| (discontinued, I used this, then switched to IceRaven FF
| fork, the UI still ain't as good, but at least it's
| developed)
| viccis wrote:
| Yeah, regular and even respected media outlets are basically
| giving you the 2005 porn pirating site experience.
| qmr wrote:
| Victim blaming.
| stodor89 wrote:
| Well, he's right in the context of HN audience. But normies
| are people too, and so are children, and so are 90-year-old
| grandmas who want to stay in touch with younger family
| members. If we don't push back against the brainrot, it may
| very well run our society into the ground.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Except the same sites _also_ attempt (with varying levels of
| effort and success) to punish users for it. None of them have
| an official stance of "if you want to control your bandwidth
| that's fine."
|
| So when it comes to this bloat, publishers bear both fault
| _and_ the responsibility to fix the problem. The viewer bears
| neither.
| 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
| Venn1 wrote:
| It's 3.60 MB with NoScript enabled.
| red_hare wrote:
| TheVerge launched a full RSS Feed for paid subscribers about a
| year ago and I've never so happily subscribed to something.
| dankwizard wrote:
| Not a problem for me (Unlimited data plan, 1000/40).
|
| The website is around PC Gaming - users with the top of the line
| machines and fast internet. I don't see a problem with websites
| catering to their audience?
|
| Why should I get a worse lower quality website full of text and
| nothing visual because somebody else has limited data?
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| By that logic, they should be pushing 500gb not 500mb, gamers
| with top of the line machines can afford it!
| donohoe wrote:
| The first Harry Potter ebook (with art) was about 1.3mb.
|
| The average news article text (only) is usually less than 20 kb.
| never_inline wrote:
| Opera Mini used to load many pages in <20kb.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Being alerted to, and preventing this, should be a built-in
| feature of the browser.
| wild_pointer wrote:
| Looking at the title, I was confused why a recommendation of some
| random PC gamer is interesting. Capitalization is important.
| __natty__ wrote:
| It's not just "PC Gamer" but people making decisions behind as
| always. Three first people from their "Meet the Team" page [0]:
| Tim Clark -- Brand Director (@timothydclark), Evan Lahti -
| Strategic Director (@elahti), Phil Savage -- Global Editor-in-
| Chief (@Octaeder). Hopefully they can see this HN thread and
| people complains and do "something" about that.
|
| [0] https://www.pcgamer.com/meet-the-team/
| casey2 wrote:
| The people writing the article, the people designing the site
| and the people slapping ads on it all work for PC gamer. You
| aren't saying anything that everybody doesn't already know, the
| point is that they are all prisoners unable to act with their
| free will.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Theres a huge difference between naming a company and naming
| individuals.
|
| That said, I've had to work on projects that I'm not 100%
| proud of. I've had the companies I work for get complained
| about and in a few cases I had to work on the thing that was
| being complained about.
|
| It's hard to argue with a balance sheet.
| neya wrote:
| I have professionally dealt with these types of people in my
| career (not these exact 3) in similar settings and I can tell
| you - they don't care. They care only about revenue numbers.
| You can walk up to them, show them this article and even this
| HN thread and their first question will be "how does it affect
| our revenue?"
|
| They don't see it as money made through ripping off users
| without their consent - they think they are entitled to that
| money. Anything that leads to less money in the name of
| usability, transparency and honesty is just met with a shrug.
|
| To them, the author of the article and the rest of us are just
| rambling developers who don't understand how businesses work.
| And they are the gold standard (they think so) for business
| ethics. So tell me again, do you really think they will do
| "something" about that?
| plasticbugs wrote:
| I personally know two of the three people named, and trust
| me, they are going to be livid about this.
| albedoa wrote:
| > trust me, they are going to be livid about this.
|
| Just as soon as...what? How are two of the top three people
| named on the "Meet the team" page simultaneously oblivious
| to the half gig of ad downloads and on the verge of caring?
|
| Forgive us for not trusting you on this.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You're not any kind of "us". You are just a single
| person, like me and everybody else here.
|
| Of course they can be - and probably are - unknowing of
| some erroneous code in one of their thousands of
| articles.
| rrgok wrote:
| How is "them being livid" is gonna help revenue?
| parineum wrote:
| > I have professionally dealt with these types of people in
| my career (not these exact 3) in similar settings and I can
| tell you - they don't care
|
| Prejudicial and cynical, nice.
| OptionX wrote:
| >"how does it affect our revenue?"
|
| Simple, you can serve a reasonable amount of unobtrusive ads
| and I and others might turn off adblock to support the
| publication or you can do what you're doing, I'll keep it on
| and see no ads at all.
| pineaux wrote:
| Nobody is turning off ad blockers.
| b345 wrote:
| I do. I have turned off UBlock Origin at the learnopengl
| site as well others where the ads are unobtrusive enough
| to not block the view completely or require several
| actions on my part to view the contents. It also helps
| that the content is not "SEO optimised" bullcrap.
| Defletter wrote:
| Yup, I keep mine enabled at all times. Anytime I've tried
| selectively disabling them, I get burnt with increasingly
| intrusive ads. I _might_ be convinced to enable some kind
| of "ethical ads" filter that only permits ads are known
| to be unobtrusive and not track, but then you need to
| trust that whoever maintains that list wont succumb to
| incentives.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I will never disable mine. I think back to when malware
| was served from ads on nytimes.com.
|
| If you let your guard down, someone will mess up and let
| malware through.
|
| Adblockers are security.
| benterix wrote:
| While I agree with you in general, I am one of the very
| few people who do it for the small amount of sites I
| support. This is not a smart decision from the technical
| point of view but it's been fine so far.
| michelb wrote:
| And PLENTY of people simply accept the ads everywhere.
| ZaoLahma wrote:
| Exactly we don't, and what's worse is that the "content"
| is getting to the point where we need _content_ blockers.
|
| I recently got hit by an "article" that promised to tell
| me which three AAA games would be released with PS Plus
| soon. A three point bullet list was all I wanted. Instead
| I got pages after pages of word-manure about nothing at
| all for reasons I don't even understand. At the end of it
| I still couldn't tell you which three games the article
| was supposed to tell me about.
|
| I foresee a bleak feature where we will deploy AI as
| "content blockers" to extract the useful content from the
| word-manure that is becoming the preferred way of working
| among internet "authors".
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| I think we'll be soon at the point where articles are
| written by asking AI to extend a three point bullet list
| to 30 pages, and read by asking AI to summarize articles
| into a three point bullet list.
| ZaoLahma wrote:
| This drives me nuts. It's been going on for years that a
| simple "if this, do that" deal is encoded in an overly
| elaborate 10 minute long YouTube video where at least 9
| minutes of it is filler. You know, when you start
| skimming the comments to see if anyone bothered with
| summarizing it.
|
| AI amplifies the problem by making it easier to produce
| filler, but the problem is whatever metrics are behind
| the monetization. You need users to "engage" with your
| content for at least x amount of time to earn y amount of
| money, while instead the earnings should be relative to
| and directly derived from how useful the content is to
| how many users.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| > Instead I got pages after pages of word-manure about
| nothing at all for reasons I don't even understand.
|
| More writing means more space to shove ads in between
| every paragraph.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > I recently got hit by an "article"
|
| Exactly how did you "get hit" by an article? Did somebody
| hack your computer and pointed your browser to it? Or did
| somebody ambush you on your walk to work and show a
| magazine with the article into your face?
|
| If you seek out content from low quality sources, you get
| the low quality treatment. The only way for consumers to
| fight this is by paying for good quality content, which
| is often possible.
|
| Burger King isn't going to improve the quality of their
| burgers or service by customers complaining. They'll do
| something when they see customers going somewhere else.
| keybored wrote:
| The PS Plus One is a gaming console or something to that
| effect. "But Henriette," my grandmother asked, "which AAA
| titles will be released for Xbox"?
|
| My grandmother is a gamer. But a bit senile. She had her
| formative gaming years on the XBox, you see. What she
| actually meant to ask was: which titles for the PS Plus
| One?
|
| My dad too has been asking me that question. Or he did
| until he tragically died in a car accident last week.
|
| So which AAA games will be released for PS Plus One soon
| or soon-ish?
|
| I really had to ponder that question while driving my
| Tesla Cybertruck to the gas station. Indeed, which games
| are that? It's on everyone's lips or mouth.
|
| Which brings us to this article. You have been wondering
| the same thing, haven't you? If so you are in good
| company, like that of my beloved grandmother and dear
| departed father.
|
| Sony says that they will reveal which three AAA titles
| will be released for PS Plus One in the fourth quarter of
| 2027.
| qrobit wrote:
| Mostly true, but I personally have it turned of for
| duckduckgo and it shows me some ads with [ad] label.
| Actually if you wanted to disable ads there, you wouldn't
| even need an ad blocker, there's toggle in the settings
| pastage wrote:
| Youtube is doing it though, and more site will follow. I
| need better AD blockers, but I do not see an easy way to
| block streaming, WASM and canvas.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I guess the ship sailed a long time ago, but while no one
| is going to turn off their ad blocker, they could make
| people not use one in the first place.
| jurgenburgen wrote:
| How does that affect revenue? Do you have some data?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| But it's PC Gamer, most of their stuff is trash, why would
| anyone pay for it?
| Angostura wrote:
| How would you like PC Gamer to pay their staff? Pop the whole
| thing behind a paywall?
|
| Yes it's poorly designed and annoying, I don't ses where you
| get 'ripping off' from. It makes you sound like a rambling
| developer who doesn't understand how businesses wor
| neya wrote:
| I know for sure good businesses don't make their users
| download half a GB worth of data without the user's
| consent/knowledge (which is what the article states) in the
| name of "paying their staff". Ironically, they are not even
| a gaming company and the users aren't exactly downloading a
| gaming application that justifies the size of the data.
| Angostura wrote:
| As I say, it's very sloppy and could be improved. It
| probably hurts their readership metrics. 'Don't
| unnecessarily annoy your customers' is a good maxim. But
| no-one is being 'ripped off'.
| philipallstar wrote:
| I think it's just they have to make money to pay salaries and
| don't have any better ideas, or they don't have the power to
| implement them.
| sef6i2dhhj wrote:
| I have worked professionally with those 3 and I can tell you
| they do care, but they don't make the decisions at Future.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I think this is extremely uncharitable and while there may be
| people this is true for, it is not at all the general case
| for people with job titles like "brand director" or "editor
| in chief". In fact I think it's obnoxious to tar specific
| named people with such a false generalization.
| gmerc wrote:
| This is the cable tv final enshittification from the 90s, every
| second of the hour being crammed with ads because that's the last
| little bit of money that can be squeezed after google took away
| all the attention
| hedora wrote:
| Over on slashdot, they're currently running a story "US Cable
| TV Industry Faces 'Dramatic Collapse' as Local Operators Shut
| Down - or Become ISPs"
|
| I can't believe the year has finally come! I also cannot
| believe the year starts with a "2".
| arkt8 wrote:
| I have no metrics but there is a lot (if not most of) sites with
| similar issues.
|
| A simple site of lyrics, or newspapers that start videos
| automatically. Github was worse, now at least opens a bit more
| faster, but still very poorer than, example, codeberg. Sites are
| sites, most want to do fancy things more than to simply let user
| read its contents.
|
| Would be nice a site that could track it to put some shame. By
| now, the better sites are just like HN, Wikipedia... unobstrusive
| and fast even without cache.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| Disabling cache and then complaining that the bandwidth usage
| never stops increasing is certainly _a_ take, but I 'm not sure
| you can meaningfully draw any conclusions from it.
| y0eswddl wrote:
| right, because most people have already visited most sites and
| continually visit them frequently enough that cache never goes
| stale.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| Except, this wasn't a "cold start" test. It was a "leave the
| page open and watch subsequent requests" test. Cache
| _absolutely_ applies here.
| drnick1 wrote:
| The modern Web is truly unusable without an aggressive DNS filter
| and/or uBlock.
| jaimex2 wrote:
| How much would that be costing them? Thats a lot of data to serve
| for no reason.
| lutusp wrote:
| Wait a sec -- the reason RSS readers don't have ads is because no
| one uses them. If we all used RSS, the advertisers would follow
| us there.
|
| The linked article doesn't offer any real remedies, so I will:
|
| * Step one: dump Microsoft Edge, install Brave, which stops most
| ads including those on YouTube.
|
| * Step two: dump Windows, install Linux. Windows 11 is an
| advertising delivery organ masquerading as an operating system.
|
| * Step three: put a list of advertiser IP addresses in the Linux
| lookup table /etc/hosts, stopping the problem at its source. This
| idea works in Windows too, but most Windows users aren't techies.
|
| * Step four: never open an account to gain access to a Website's
| content. Websites require you to sign up only so they can legally
| mail you advertising without breaking the law.
|
| * Want to hear the FBI's advice on this topic? To avoid many
| online dangers, they warn you to install an ad blocker
| (https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2022/PSA221221).
|
| But most ad blockers now let some ads through ... only "good
| ones," meaning those who pay enough to circumvent the filter.
|
| Most advertising is BS anyway. Prove me wrong -- tell me the last
| time you saw an ad for potatoes. Or a walk in the park.
|
| Most advertising is actually a meta-ad for consumerism -- you
| need to buy stuff. What you have isn't good enough. But hey --
| don't get me started.
| dpc_01234 wrote:
| These ad companies pay for transfer too.
|
| Install AdNauseam if you have unmetered connection and let it
| download as much data from them as it can.
| kogasa240p wrote:
| Holy shit that is horrifying.
| NamlchakKhandro wrote:
| and they wonder why we use adblockers.
|
| ima start browsing the web via lynx 100% now
| charwhee wrote:
| I immediately thought of this article:
| https://growtika.com/blog/tech-media-collapse . These websites
| are losing market share to search and AI; clinging to their
| business model I suspect they are forced to display an inordinate
| amount of advertising to make up for their dwindling views. The
| value they provide is still there, but the advertising revenue
| that paid for it is not.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| 15 years ago I had a 7GB mobile data plan (in Japan). After 7GB,
| it was throttled to 100kbps. If I tethered my PC and there was an
| update available, or browsed modern sites (especially while
| tethered), this could easily be wiped out in a few days. After
| 7GB, sites like hackernews, google search/maps worked fine, and
| most websites loaded after a minute at most.
|
| 10 years ago I still had a 7GB mobile data plan (in Japan). After
| 7GB, it was throttled to 100kbps. If I tethered my PC and there
| was an update available, or browsed modern sites (especially
| while tethered), this could easily be wiped out in a minutes.
| After 7GB, sites like hackernews, google search/maps worked fine,
| although most search results failed to load.
|
| 5 years ago I still had a 7GB mobile data plan (in Japan). After
| 7GB, it was throttled to 1Mbps. If I tethered my PC and there was
| an update available, or browsed modern sites (especially while
| tethered), this could easily (and usually was) wiped out in a few
| minutes. Browsing reddit easily consumed 1GB in a day. After 7GB,
| sites like hackernews, google search/maps worked fine, although
| most search results failed to load.
|
| I currently live in Europe, I am too old for dealing with the
| above shit or dealing with wifi in a town/restaurant/hotel so I
| pay for unlimited data throughout EU. But, it's fairly common
| while driving or training around that I end up on 3G. I
| understand 3G is degraded these days, but it should provide
| 300-2000 kbps. Almost nothing internet-related works at these
| speeds today. WhatsApp is the exception, it works eventually. I
| bet hackernews could load if you could somehow disable all the
| background things happening. I've had a few experiences where I
| reached a timeout for a login on Apple, google or MS services,
| and been locked out of my account for a few days because trying
| to login with low datarate means trying to login 30x in 10
| minutes which must look suspicious.
|
| Yesterday I was skiing at a resort and my phone was dying at an
| incredible rate, like 25% per hour. I don't know for certain but
| I suspect some app or website was retrying a download of
| something while in a dodgy service area. I'm sure it's happened
| that someone has been slightly injured going off into the trees
| at 2pm at a ski resort (or had a fall on parking lot ice, or fell
| down stairs in their home, or been run off the road), and not
| been able to call for help because some app has been loading ads
| and killed their phone battery.
| vasco wrote:
| > Yesterday I was skiing at a resort and my phone was dying at
| an incredible rate, like 25% per hour. I don't know for certain
| but I suspect some app or website was retrying a download of
| something while in a dodgy service area.
|
| Whenever you have poor service (but not none) that's when
| phones waste the most energy trying to crank up RF transmit
| power and doing retry loops. I doubt it was actually trying to
| download much.
|
| You can try this by putting your phone in a homemade Faraday
| cage with tin foil in a Tupperware or something.
| guardian5x wrote:
| Back in the day, when you saw as many ads or popups as some
| websites show today, it usually meant you had at least 3 viruses
| on the computer.
| pjmlp wrote:
| This everywhere now, any Website that belongs to Windows Central
| parent company is now an unusable mess of ads, videos, the
| comments are a micro webapp that takes seconds to download.
|
| Completely impossible to use on mobile phone.
| Dban1 wrote:
| that's why everyone needs A19 Pro max chips ASAP
| Surac wrote:
| in warhammer40k surfing without adblocker would be herasy
| onra87 wrote:
| I'm just going to blacklist this kind of website. I get that they
| need advertising to survive. But taken to this extreme, it's just
| disrespectful to their readers.
| alexchengyuli wrote:
| Sadly many people wouldn't even notice 500MB anymore. That's kind
| of the point. A PS2 game was 4GB. Now a single update patch is
| 50GB. Software stopped being designed for everyone a long time
| ago. It's just more obvious when it's a 500MB article about RSS
| readers.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Typical example of a fraudster
| My_Name wrote:
| And this is why I pi-hole (although I am thinking of changing to
| technitium)
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| After working in ad tech for a few years I am fully loaded up
| on ad blockers
| econ wrote:
| I'm trying to think in the other (wrong) direction. If we can't
| escape funding things with advertising the document format can be
| improved to facilitate what people are trying to build. If each
| page view needs to be a full multiplayer auction it doesn't need
| to be this heavy. Not creating something like this will also
| exclude sane minds from what should and what shouldn't be
| included and put a price tag on questionable things. For ad
| platforms micro payments are normal. One can already pay for
| participating in the auction. If you fail to win the top slots
| your ticket is still good for less popular ones etc
| cxplay wrote:
| You don't need RSS; you need AdBlock.
| cxplay wrote:
| Try next filters:
| www.pcgamer.com##aside#affiliate-disclaimer
| www.pcgamer.com##aside[data-component-
| name="Recirculation:ArticleRiver"]
| www.pcgamer.com##aside[data-mrf-recirculation="article-river-
| stacked"] www.pcgamer.com##div.slice-container-
| newsletterForm www.pcgamer.com##div[data-widget-
| type="deal"] www.pcgamer.com##span.article-continues-
| below www.pcgamer.com#$#div.widget-area-group {display:
| block;} www.pcgamer.com#$#div.widget-area.basis-full
| {width: 100%;} www.pcgamer.com$$div[id="slice-container-
| popularBox"]
| www.pcgamer.com$$script[type="text/javascript"][data-id]
| ||pcgamer.com$to=~viafoura.co,script
| ttctciyf wrote:
| noscript, ublock origin, reader view: the referenced page loads
| in 2s on a bad connection and downloads no ads while remaining
| perfectly readable.
|
| Browsing and not using these tools nowadays is volunteering for a
| bad time, IMO.
| clircle wrote:
| +1 for FreshRSS (recommended at the bottom of the PC Gamer
| article). I just started my mass migration to self-hosting (it's
| way better in 2026 than it used to be), and I'm very pleased with
| the FreshRSS webapp and NetNewsWire integration. I consider it a
| solid hedge against enshittification. I probably won't go full
| self-hosting, but I'm enjoying the move.
| tgdhtdujeytd wrote:
| That's outrageous--advertisements have really gone too far.
| rpgbr wrote:
| Wipr 2 ad blocker for Safari reduced the transfer size of PC
| World article to 3,5 MB.
| cozzyd wrote:
| 37 millibar? That's quite the bird's eye view.
| sigio wrote:
| With adblock loaded, the page loaded a whopping 10MB, after
| scrolling all the way to the bottom.
|
| So yeah. It might be bad, but I can only recommend everyone on
| low-data-rates/plans to always use an adblock/contentblocker.
|
| (169 requests, 10.59MB / 3.28 MB transferred), total time 1.10
| min)
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| This reminds me of the bug I experienced on gcp console with dark
| reader. Somehow this caused a memory leak, and one could watch
| the page slowly consume GBs of memory. I once came back from
| lunch to see it had eaten all ram on my MBP and had consumed a
| massive amount of swap.
|
| I would not have expected a 'dark mode' extension to cause that.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1172/
| whalesalad wrote:
| Trying to use the internet without an adblocker is honestly a
| tragic and harrowing experience.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| - can we get a trend on HN here of all the websites doing this
| currnetly?
|
| - i read a post of NYTimes the other day, can we get people to
| submit this stuff which is far more useful than half the vibe
| coded AI slop apps?
| Jolter wrote:
| I recall hating the PC Gamer web site back in the late 90's. It
| was sluggish on modem because of the banner ads and the heavy use
| of GIF decorations on their pages. Nothing is new under the sun.
| Well, they used to have some great articles...
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