Nice! I spent a few months in a bandwidth constrained environment (bluetooth tunnel to free Cafe wifi across the town square...). I generally got a few KB/s. The recent article on Antarctica's internet reminded me of those days.

HN was one of the only sites that was reasonably pleasant to use during that time. Still, I found it more fun and faster to surf via a VPS. So the VPS itself would load and render the page, and only send me the bytes over Mosh (a more efficient SSH protocol).

I tried a few terminal based browsers using this setup. The one that worked best for HN (especially comment indentation!) was w3m.

Here's the current thread in w3m: https://files.catbox.moe/zuabb4.png

I did have fast mobile data but it was expensive and limited. I watched a lot of videos on YouTube and one day realized that almost everything I watched was actually just lectures or discussions. So I could just stream the audio and save 80% of the bandwidth.

I set up a little PHP script* that took a YouTube URL and ran `youtube-dl -g f bestaudio` to give you the URL of an audio-only stream. (Directly from YouTube's servers!)

I could then just load it directly in my browser, or download it for later. (I think I should have used `worstaudio` instead.)

* That little utility page is not up anymore, but others found it very useful so I should probably make another one...

Another benefit of this is to battery life (decoding video is expensive) and being able to turn off the screen (a feature that Google banned from the app store, years before making their own (paid) version available...) Later I learned about f-droid and newpipe... good times :)