alt Hacker NewsPC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At this point, if you browse the internet without an adblock; it is on YOU.
The person who wrote the article and the people in charge of the site are different.
Even more embarassing is that the article adds really nothing to whatever was written before about rss. Probably gobbled up by AI
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
Looking at the title, I was confused why a recommendation of some random PC gamer is interesting. Capitalization is important.
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.
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:
Thank God for uMatrix. Seriously, I don't know how I lived without that thing. Load times on everything are at least 30% faster.
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
The first Harry Potter ebook (with art) was about 1.3mb.
The average news article text (only) is usually less than 20 kb.
TheVerge launched a full RSS Feed for paid subscribers about a year ago and I've never so happily subscribed to something.
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...
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.
this just reminds me of...
- watching "normal" cable tv
- listening to "normal" fm radio
- shopping on amazon (sponsored... everything)
It's 3.60 MB with NoScript enabled.
Being alerted to, and preventing this, should be a built-in feature of the browser.
it's relatively easy for an ai to write such an article now, just open all websites and gather metrics while crawling...
wtf is this tittle
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.