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Comment by freddie_mercury | Hacker News Reader

> For example, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in the single-digit GBs

I live in a poor Southeast Asian country.

People with small data plans don't use data from efficient websites, they use wifi which is omnipresent.

30GB of data on a monthly plan is $3.64. Which is about 4-6 hours of minimum wage (minimum wage is lower in agricultural areas).

But more to the point, people don't use data profligately like in the West. Every single cafe, restaurant, supermarket, and mall has free wifi. Most people ask for the wifi password before they ask for the menu.

I've never seen or heard anyone talk about a website using up their data too fast.

It honestly sounds like a made up concern from people who've never actually lived in a developing country.

People here run out of data from watching videos on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Not from website bloat.

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> Every single cafe, restaurant, supermarket, and mall has free wifi.

I live in a major city in the Philippines, and free WiFi is becoming more of a rarity nowadays. Not even Starbucks and other big chain restaurants, malls, and cafes offer WiFi anymore because of how widely available data is. They expect you to bring your own data and tether if you want to browse or do some work.

In more rural areas, WiFi is definitely not widely available. On the rare chance it’s even offered, it’s usually “piso WiFi” paid by the minute.

I live in one. You're talking nonsense.

That 30GB plan is more than some people with phones earn here

Thank you for the first hand experience anecdote!

I think one way for first world country citizens to empathise with this is how people behave when on roaming data plans during overseas trips. One does keep to public WiFi as much as possible and keep mobile data usage to a minimum or for emergency purposes.

> I've never seen or heard anyone talk about a website using up their data too fast.

Is this because the website usage doesn't add up or because they don't have the tools to track which sites are using how much data?

I mean not using Data Plan here in Northern Europe was me 11 years ago… and me using it sparingly because video or songs would blow through the Data Plan instantly was me eight years ago.

Yeah, I still remember when I started massively using the cellular Web : at the time it cost 1024€/Go, which I found to be cheap !

eh, idk. This is your anecdotal experience, there are others (like me) who have different ones

>It honestly sounds like a made up concern from people who've never actually lived in a developing country.

I once loaded a site that loaded approx 324mb "Super resolution" image (I knew it was high res, but I thought it was like 30-40 mb at best). Took care of 1/3rd of my monthly data in a single page load.

A useful feature of uBlockOrigin is being able to block all media elements larger than a given amount such as 50KB. Wish I could set it to only do this on mobile networks and let wifi stay unlimited.

"It honestly sounds like a made up concern from people who've never actually lived in a developing country."

You mean, the one developing country you live in.

You are also missing the full spectrum of users. People don't just browse the web for fun. They look for important information like health or finance information, they might not want to do that in a public place or they might not be able to put it off for when they next have wifi.

If you are building an e commerce website it might not matter, but you could be building a news site, or any number of other things.

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