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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
37MB sounds like pure mismanagement though beyond understandable desperation. Surely a competent consultant could reduce that number with zero negative impact?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unlimited data! You make it sound so easy.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
How are they supposed to know which job search platforms (app or web) aren’t going to blow their bandwidth limits?
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.
Email and chat apps will work, but everything else will slow to a crawl at best and time out at worst.
by email you mean pop3, imap and smtp or the heavy html web client?
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.
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?"
lol, right?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> (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?
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.
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...
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.
They can go to a library. Or go to basically any business (or sit outside) and use their WiFi.
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?
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.
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".
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.
I was gonna say - the public library wifi is up to this task.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I have 4g of data and never go over. I use it for maps, email even hn.
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.
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.
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!
Even with good bandwidth and unlimited data, it’s still disrespectful.
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.
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.
Estimates suggest that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all Internet users in the U.S. use an ad blocker.
Now that we have auto play video ads? Most of it.
Agreed, my data plan don't approve these kind of pages.
Nah, in my opinion the original title is art. That line is a whopper though.
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.
Does cache turn off when the Chrome network panel is open?
It does when the "disable caches" checkbox is checked, as it is in that screenshot.
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.
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.
I’ve always wondered about this, does it stop downloading the video when it stops playing?
My guess is no.
StopTheMadness will do this pretty well for $15.
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/
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?
I personally know two of the three people named, and trust me, they are going to be livid about this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They need to have more ads so that they can afford to pay for the bandwidth used by all of the ads.
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
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.
I don't mind small non-animated banners either, but anything animated or even audio is a hard DO NOT WANT.
It's still useful for comprehending the scale of volume. The useful part of the article is a few KB.
Put another way, the initial page would barely fit (by itself) on the first hard drive I ever used.
Windows XP + Encarta.
The future is today!
Windows XP install disk is 600 MB, so pretty close to that on this website already.
Encarta
You can still subscribe to the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
It's one way of avoiding AI garbage.
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.
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.
Yet with RSS you can read between 300 and 1800 articles, depending on the feed type.
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)
> 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.
>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?
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.
You mean Ublock, not Unlock, I assume?
You are correct. Sorry for the typo.
I think Firefox just rolled out some kind of autocomplete; I haven't compensated yet.
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.
At this point, if you browse the internet without an adblock; it is on YOU.
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?
Not using Chrome. Mobile Firefox has adblocking on Android.
On iOS, you can use Orion by Kagi, which is webkit-based, but supports Firefox plugins. UBlock Origin for Firefox works well there too.
Almost any other browser. I've used Firefox and Brave on Android with adblocking
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.
yeah I got a lifetime license for Adguard (no affiliation) & been using that for three years now - it's been great.
Yeah, regular and even respected media outlets are basically giving you the 2005 porn pirating site experience.
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 ...
*without
Yes, I just can't imagine why would one browser the internet without adblock.
It's not
It is
The person who wrote the article and the people in charge of the site are different.
Readers don't care. Customers don't care about the internal details of the company.
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.
This is such an extreme reach.
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.
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.
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.
The first Harry Potter ebook (with art) was about 1.3mb.
The average news article text (only) is usually less than 20 kb.
Opera Mini used to load many pages in <20kb.
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.
Even more embarassing is that the article adds really nothing to whatever was written before about rss. Probably gobbled up by AI
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.
right, because most people have already visited most sites and continually visit them frequently enough that cache never goes stale.
Except, this wasn't a "cold start" test. It was a "leave the page open and watch subsequent requests" test. Cache absolutely applies here.
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
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.
I just don't pay for sites that don't offer full-text RSS (or email newsletters, for some sites) for subscribers.
I use the iOS app of https://brutalist.report for this these days.
Lighthouse can sometimes find RSS feeds for pages that don’t show an RSS button on the page:
https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder
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.
no love for elinks?
Maybe not considered a solution, but: print.
Reader mode + ad blocker
Further: configure reader mode as the default for the sites you’re most commonly linked to.
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.
Most quality journals are paywalled nowadays, I'm considering to scrape using my cookie, or maybe use archive.is..
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".
For a lot of sites Firefox's reader mode is great at bypassing paywalls, just turn it on & refresh
> no paid media provides full articles in RSS anymore
Substack does and it's first class. Patreon does a decent job.
Not an RSS solution, also relies on US-based third parties.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
[delayed]
I hope whoever is running Pinterest sees they are the top 7 most blocked sites.
...and that whoever is running HN sees that they are the #5 raised, and #5 pinned site.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Both are measuring the amount of data transferred, one with hot cache, other is without. The number is not inflated.
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.
The modern Web is truly unusable without an aggressive DNS filter and/or uBlock.
Thank God for uMatrix. Seriously, I don't know how I lived without that thing. Load times on everything are at least 30% faster.
Hello time traveler! Um, there's a pandemic coming with 2020. Buy the dip, stocks are going to skyrocket for at least 5 years.
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
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
Looking at the title, I was confused why a recommendation of some random PC gamer is interesting. Capitalization is important.
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...
this just reminds me of...
- watching "normal" cable tv
- listening to "normal" fm radio
- shopping on amazon (sponsored... everything)
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.
> 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.
Arr matey
Ahoy, sailor!
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.
> 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.
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.
To be fair, this was almost a decade ago.
TheVerge launched a full RSS Feed for paid subscribers about a year ago and I've never so happily subscribed to something.
It's 3.60 MB with NoScript enabled.
How much would that be costing them? Thats a lot of data to serve for no reason.
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
it's relatively easy for an ai to write such an article now, just open all websites and gather metrics while crawling...
Being alerted to, and preventing this, should be a built-in feature of the browser.
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.
Holy shit that is horrifying.
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.
wtf is this tittle
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.
Yeah, those are rather large for those of us not on retina displays.
(Is 3150x2210 a normal resolution / aspect ratio for those, anyway?)
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.
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.
I'll probably leave reddit when old.Reddit.com gets the chop
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.
Same, but it sounds like Lemmy still has some issues, and it'll be hard to replace some of the niche subreddits.
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.
This is the problem. There's no good replacement for Reddit right now, and Digg just died again.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
By that logic, they should be pushing 500gb not 500mb, gamers with top of the line machines can afford it!