PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading | Hacker News Reader

PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading

stuartbreckenridge.net

841 pointsJumpCrisscross396 comments

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.

Talking about (electronic-)waste, what’s choking is how much resources are required to do the same or less than what used to be possible with far more humble hardware and bandwidth, all that in living memory.

Sure part of "software fills space like a gas" can be explained by "got to go fast to stay ahead on the market", but at some point it’s blatant negligence of frugality where it’s providing overall economical benefits.

> it’s blatant negligence of frugality where it’s providing overall economical benefits.

Recently tried to alter a phone plan on EE’s website, something that should have involved a few clicks. It was slow (literal seconds to open a page) and clunky. The Javascript console was bleeding error messages, and it looked like they’d used every Javascript framework under the sun. And after all that it just gave me an error message saying that the transaction could not be processed.

Gave up and texted (old school SMS) their help line. With a few text messages I was able to change plans. Probably used under 500 bytes to accomplish what the bloated and broken website couldn’t.

I think a basic principle with limited plans that offer the ability to buy extra data is "You should be able to actually load the account platform at the 2G hobbled speeds in order to pay". The heavyweight website/app for the mobile network, combined with the use of a phone number-tied Android login as primary login credential rather than a user account, it meant that the only way to actually get 4G back online was to have access to wifi on the phone in the place & time you needed to re-up; If I did have that access at work, I wouldn't need the data.

Despite years of being too lazy/anxious to figure out phone number portability, I ultimately ended up switching carriers from Simple to Mint because it was just too annoying.

> 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.

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?

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?"

> If someone needs a phone like this for email and job searching and has no other option, 2G speeds will work.

2G EDGE was 384 kbit/s (48 kB/s) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G). That means 21 seconds to download a 1 MB page.

I just loaded the careers page at my employer, and the page weighed in at 3.6 MB, so you're talking 75 seconds.

Email and chat apps will work, but everything else will slow to a crawl at best and time out at worst.

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.

2G (EDGE, EDGE+) doesn't allow you to do a job search.

In reality this is like 16kb with speeds similar to 56k modem. No modern JS website works. Ssh, irc works and thats about it. Modern stuff like certificates also slows it down.

I'm talking here about real life - not some emulated 2G in your browser.

sounds like someone never tried connection that slow on modern sites

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.

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 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.

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.

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 arrived in a small airport at midnight. Served only by Uber. Since I use Lyft elsewhere, my phone had deleted the Uber app. It took 15 minutes to download that: crappy Wifi and some kind of 5G dead zone. Sometimes you really need to download the app.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

> I've worked with a lot of people at the bottom end of society in the USA.

In adtech?

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.

> These phones come with 3GB of regular data per month. […] Three days into the month these phones are just ewaste.

Are you saying using 1GB of data a day on a smartphone is normal for smartphone users? I have a 10GB plan not because I need it (looking at this year, 2GB would be more than sufficient) but because that’s about the lowest I can get nowadays.

Certainly if, as indicated, the intent is for these users to have a phone for essentials, not for watching YouTube or playing music, 3 GB, IMO, should be sufficient.

My phone also reports as only having used a couple of gigabytes of mobile data each month but that's because most of the time I'm using it attached to wifi at home or work. The people being given free phone plans by the government probably don't have a home internet connection, that 3GB of data will be the only access they have outside of finding a library that's somehow still funded, or paying for a drink to use coffee shop wifi.

Maybe YouTube or listening to music aren't strictly essentials but they also don't seem like absurd luxuries that we should be arbitrarily denying to people in 2026 to save a few cents per user on what I assume is a set of bulk purchased SIMs.

How so? Aren't there any public wifi anymore?

My daughter also has a 3GB data plan but she knows to only use whatsapp when she isn't connected to a Wifi network and we configured it to not auto load the photos and videos when on mobile data.

As someone living in a non-net-neutral country this really is the big advantage everybody in net-neutral-land ignores: Meta and Google pay for nearly all of my data use (one of them even seems to cover HN).

Meta and Google aren't the ones paying in the end, you are - just indirectly.

I have a 8gb plan and don't go out of my way to connect to wifi everywhere I go. 3 is almost a third of that, but I don't spend it all every month.

Normies don't have good intuition for the size of different kinds of data. They'll stream Netflix for a few hours then genuinely wonder how they hit their data limit because they "weren't even using the internet."

this is why Firefox with uBO is basically a requirement to browse mobile internet.

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.

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.

Money wasted by the user on a data contract is a gain for the carrier.

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.

This also partially explains why my phone sometimes gets hot and uses a double digit of battery randomly when using the browser if it’s streaming video in multiple divs

Fully agree. Having worked closely with a marketing exec/entreprenur type, I've never felt more incompatible with a person's worldview. I mentioned the ads that are "disrespectful to users" at one point when he put one of those annoying modals that pops up half way through the story, and he looked utterly perplexed that anyone would even think thoughts like that. When I pointed out that his analytics and ad stuff were turning my hard-fought 100 ms full page load work into a 5 second nasty mess (I used much more diplomatic language with him :-) ) it was like I was trying to tell a hunter-gatherer to go vegan during the winter.

I really think the marketing people behind most websites just could not give a shit less about users. To them, they are faceless plebs to be manipulated and milked, not humans to be respected. It's quite disheartening.

Agreed, my data plan don't approve these kind of pages.

Could also be looping videos - some browsers had bugs whereby looping videos would continously redownload.

I recall some years back having corporate IT ask me why I was downloading terabytes off this weird website called "imgur" that they didn't know about. Realized I had a tab open with a stupid jackie chan mp4 a few seconds long on some background workspace, and that had just kept downloading over and over and over and over...

Streaming video of the website would take less than browsing the website

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.

This is incorrect. The setting does not apply to Safari. It's for App Store, for example.

Now tested - you’re right

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.

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.

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.

If anything ads on page built like that will make sure I won't buy that particular product ever

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.

Fair enough, let's use dvd rips as a metric instead. They tend to begin at 700MB.

So by reading this article on PC gamer you've now downloaded the equivalent of a full-length movie worth of low quality code and ads.

700MB, that's a CD. ~70 minutes of music, uncompressed.

A DVD (single layer) holds about 4.7GB of data.

You can easily get compressed episodes of a TV show that are 250MB, so it's like watching a TV series at the rate of 2 episodes every 5 minutes. Obviously better quality is in the range 500MB-1.5GB for a 45-minute episode, so even being generous it's 20 minutes of compressed TV or 70 minutes of uncompressed music every 5 minutes.

Just for ads on a website.

Yes, as I understand it, the ~700 MiB "standard" was derived from the capacity of a CD. A rip is definitionally a copy that lacks some of the original data of the source media.

DVDs were in the 4-5GB range.

700MB “rips” are heavily compressed with modern codecs.

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.

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.

Mind maze!

Put another way, the initial page would barely fit (by itself) on the first hard drive I ever used.

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.

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.

Results appear to vary. 2.5-3.4MB with 2560x1600 resolution. Firefox + uBlock + uMatrix + DDG essentials.

Yet with RSS you can read between 300 and 1800 articles, depending on the feed type.

>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.

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.

15 years ago I had a 7GB mobile data plan (in Japan). After 7GB, it was throttled to 100kbps. If I tethered my PC and there was an update available, or browsed modern sites (especially while tethered), this could easily be wiped out in a few days. After 7GB, sites like hackernews, google search/maps worked fine, and most websites loaded after a minute at most.

10 years ago I still had a 7GB mobile data plan (in Japan). After 7GB, it was throttled to 100kbps. If I tethered my PC and there was an update available, or browsed modern sites (especially while tethered), this could easily be wiped out in a minutes. After 7GB, sites like hackernews, google search/maps worked fine, although most search results failed to load.

5 years ago I still had a 7GB mobile data plan (in Japan). After 7GB, it was throttled to 1Mbps. If I tethered my PC and there was an update available, or browsed modern sites (especially while tethered), this could easily (and usually was) wiped out in a few minutes. Browsing reddit easily consumed 1GB in a day. After 7GB, sites like hackernews, google search/maps worked fine, although most search results failed to load.

I currently live in Europe, I am too old for dealing with the above shit or dealing with wifi in a town/restaurant/hotel so I pay for unlimited data throughout EU. But, it's fairly common while driving or training around that I end up on 3G. I understand 3G is degraded these days, but it should provide 300-2000 kbps. Almost nothing internet-related works at these speeds today. WhatsApp is the exception, it works eventually. I bet hackernews could load if you could somehow disable all the background things happening. I've had a few experiences where I reached a timeout for a login on Apple, google or MS services, and been locked out of my account for a few days because trying to login with low datarate means trying to login 30x in 10 minutes which must look suspicious.

Yesterday I was skiing at a resort and my phone was dying at an incredible rate, like 25% per hour. I don't know for certain but I suspect some app or website was retrying a download of something while in a dodgy service area. I'm sure it's happened that someone has been slightly injured going off into the trees at 2pm at a ski resort (or had a fall on parking lot ice, or fell down stairs in their home, or been run off the road), and not been able to call for help because some app has been loading ads and killed their phone battery.

> Yesterday I was skiing at a resort and my phone was dying at an incredible rate, like 25% per hour. I don't know for certain but I suspect some app or website was retrying a download of something while in a dodgy service area.

Whenever you have poor service (but not none) that's when phones waste the most energy trying to crank up RF transmit power and doing retry loops. I doubt it was actually trying to download much.

You can try this by putting your phone in a homemade Faraday cage with tin foil in a Tupperware or something.

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?

>"how does it affect our revenue?"

Simple, you can serve a reasonable amount of unobtrusive ads and I and others might turn off adblock to support the publication or you can do what you're doing, I'll keep it on and see no ads at all.

Nobody is turning off ad blockers.

Exactly we don't, and what's worse is that the "content" is getting to the point where we need _content_ blockers.

I recently got hit by an "article" that promised to tell me which three AAA games would be released with PS Plus soon. A three point bullet list was all I wanted. Instead I got pages after pages of word-manure about nothing at all for reasons I don't even understand. At the end of it I still couldn't tell you which three games the article was supposed to tell me about.

I foresee a bleak feature where we will deploy AI as "content blockers" to extract the useful content from the word-manure that is becoming the preferred way of working among internet "authors".

The PS Plus One is a gaming console or something to that effect. “But Henriette,” my grandmother asked, “which AAA titles will be released for Xbox”?

My grandmother is a gamer. But a bit senile. She had her formative gaming years on the XBox, you see. What she actually meant to ask was: which titles for the PS Plus One?

My dad too has been asking me that question. Or he did until he tragically died in a car accident last week.

So which AAA games will be released for PS Plus One soon or soon-ish?

I really had to ponder that question while driving my Tesla Cybertruck to the gas station. Indeed, which games are that? It’s on everyone’s lips or mouth.

Which brings us to this article. You have been wondering the same thing, haven’t you? If so you are in good company, like that of my beloved grandmother and dear departed father.

Sony says that they will reveal which three AAA titles will be released for PS Plus One in the fourth quarter of 2027.

I think we'll be soon at the point where articles are written by asking AI to extend a three point bullet list to 30 pages, and read by asking AI to summarize articles into a three point bullet list.

> Instead I got pages after pages of word-manure about nothing at all for reasons I don't even understand.

More writing means more space to shove ads in between every paragraph.

> I recently got hit by an "article"

Exactly how did you "get hit" by an article? Did somebody hack your computer and pointed your browser to it? Or did somebody ambush you on your walk to work and show a magazine with the article into your face?

If you seek out content from low quality sources, you get the low quality treatment. The only way for consumers to fight this is by paying for good quality content, which is often possible.

Burger King isn't going to improve the quality of their burgers or service by customers complaining. They'll do something when they see customers going somewhere else.

Yup, I keep mine enabled at all times. Anytime I've tried selectively disabling them, I get burnt with increasingly intrusive ads. I might be convinced to enable some kind of "ethical ads" filter that only permits ads are known to be unobtrusive and not track, but then you need to trust that whoever maintains that list wont succumb to incentives.

I will never disable mine. I think back to when malware was served from ads on nytimes.com.

If you let your guard down, someone will mess up and let malware through.

Adblockers are security.

I do. I have turned off UBlock Origin at the learnopengl site as well others where the ads are unobtrusive enough to not block the view completely or require several actions on my part to view the contents. It also helps that the content is not "SEO optimised" bullcrap.

Mostly true, but I personally have it turned of for duckduckgo and it shows me some ads with [ad] label. Actually if you wanted to disable ads there, you wouldn't even need an ad blocker, there's toggle in the settings

While I agree with you in general, I am one of the very few people who do it for the small amount of sites I support. This is not a smart decision from the technical point of view but it's been fine so far.

Youtube is doing it though, and more site will follow. I need better AD blockers, but I do not see an easy way to block streaming, WASM and canvas.

I guess the ship sailed a long time ago, but while no one is going to turn off their ad blocker, they could make people not use one in the first place.

And PLENTY of people simply accept the ads everywhere.

How does that affect revenue? Do you have some data?

But it's PC Gamer, most of their stuff is trash, why would anyone pay for it?

I think this is extremely uncharitable and while there may be people this is true for, it is not at all the general case for people with job titles like "brand director" or "editor in chief". In fact I think it's obnoxious to tar specific named people with such a false generalization.

I think it's just they have to make money to pay salaries and don't have any better ideas, or they don't have the power to implement them.

I have worked professionally with those 3 and I can tell you they do care, but they don't make the decisions at Future.

How would you like PC Gamer to pay their staff? Pop the whole thing behind a paywall?

Yes it’s poorly designed and annoying, I don’t ses where you get ‘ripping off’ from. It makes you sound like a rambling developer who doesn’t understand how businesses wor

I know for sure good businesses don't make their users download half a GB worth of data without the user's consent/knowledge (which is what the article states) in the name of "paying their staff". Ironically, they are not even a gaming company and the users aren't exactly downloading a gaming application that justifies the size of the data.

As I say, it’s very sloppy and could be improved. It probably hurts their readership metrics. ‘Don’t unnecessarily annoy your customers’ is a good maxim. But no-one is being ‘ripped off’.

I personally know two of the three people named, and trust me, they are going to be livid about this.

> trust me, they are going to be livid about this.

Just as soon as...what? How are two of the top three people named on the "Meet the team" page simultaneously oblivious to the half gig of ad downloads and on the verge of caring?

Forgive us for not trusting you on this.

You're not any kind of "us". You are just a single person, like me and everybody else here.

Of course they can be - and probably are - unknowing of some erroneous code in one of their thousands of articles.

[flagged]

How is "them being livid" is gonna help revenue?

> I have professionally dealt with these types of people in my career (not these exact 3) in similar settings and I can tell you - they don't care

Prejudicial and cynical, nice.

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.

Back in the day, when you saw as many ads or popups as some websites show today, it usually meant you had at least 3 viruses on the computer.

The person who wrote the article and the people in charge of the site are different.

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.

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.

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.

This is such an extreme reach.

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.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

Readers don't care. Customers don't care about the internal details of the company.

As if the so called journos are any better with the absolute garbage they write for that site.

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.

At this point, if you browse the internet without an adblock; it is on YOU.

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 ...

Except the same sites also attempt (with varying levels of effort and success) to punish users for it. None of them have an official stance of "if you want to control your bandwidth that's fine."

So when it comes to this bloat, publishers bear both fault and the responsibility to fix the problem. The viewer bears neither.

Yeah, regular and even respected media outlets are basically giving you the 2005 porn pirating site experience.

Victim blaming.

Well, he's right in the context of HN audience. But normies are people too, and so are children, and so are 90-year-old grandmas who want to stay in touch with younger family members. If we don't push back against the brainrot, it may very well run our society into the ground.

You're not a victim if you have choice.

How do you explain this to all 8 billion people? How do they all know this is possible?

*without

Yes, I just can't imagine why would one browser the internet without adblock.

It's not

It is

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.

Or Brave. Or AdGuard.

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.

Almost any other browser. I've used Firefox and Brave on Android with adblocking

Firefox supports extensions (uBlock Origin, Video Background Play Fix - these two are enough for me)

most of the browsers have built-in adblockers, but I would suggest to stay way from browsers not supporting extensions

other browsers with (limited) extension support on Android - Edge (MS), Yandex (RU), Quetta (CN), Kiwi browser (discontinued, I used this, then switched to IceRaven FF fork, the UI still ain't as good, but at least it's developed)

yeah I got a lifetime license for Adguard (no affiliation) & been using that for three years now - it's been great.

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.

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.

This everywhere now, any Website that belongs to Windows Central parent company is now an unusable mess of ads, videos, the comments are a micro webapp that takes seconds to download.

Completely impossible to use on mobile phone.

that's why everyone needs A19 Pro max chips ASAP

I immediately thought of this article: https://growtika.com/blog/tech-media-collapse . These websites are losing market share to search and AI; clinging to their business model I suspect they are forced to display an inordinate amount of advertising to make up for their dwindling views. The value they provide is still there, but the advertising revenue that paid for it is not.

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.

Even more embarassing is that the article adds really nothing to whatever was written before about rss. Probably gobbled up by AI

The irony really does make the case better than the article itself. I've been using Articyl for a while, RSS feeds, saved articles, and podcasts all in one place. The saved article reader strips everything back to just the content, so no 37MB surprises. It can also send your reading list to a Kindle as PDF/EPUB over email if you want to get away from screens entirely.

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 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'm hoping/dreaming it would be browser-standard, as a protocol. Kagi would be one of the reputation providers in that scheme.

Funny to see w3schools.com ranking above Twitter.

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.

I recall hating the PC Gamer web site back in the late 90’s. It was sluggish on modem because of the banner ads and the heavy use of GIF decorations on their pages. Nothing is new under the sun. Well, they used to have some great articles…

I'm trying to think in the other (wrong) direction. If we can't escape funding things with advertising the document format can be improved to facilitate what people are trying to build. If each page view needs to be a full multiplayer auction it doesn't need to be this heavy. Not creating something like this will also exclude sane minds from what should and what shouldn't be included and put a price tag on questionable things. For ad platforms micro payments are normal. One can already pay for participating in the auction. If you fail to win the top slots your ticket is still good for less popular ones etc

And this is why I pi-hole (although I am thinking of changing to technitium)

After working in ad tech for a few years I am fully loaded up on ad blockers

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

I use the iOS app of https://brutalist.report for this these days.

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.

> 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.

From TFM:

> You can find the RSS feed for your publication at https://your.substack.com/feed.

> Replace "your" with the name of your Substack publication.

Lighthouse can sometimes find RSS feeds for pages that don’t show an RSS button on the page:

https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder

Reader mode + ad blocker

Further: configure reader mode as the default for the sites you’re most commonly linked to.

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?

I just don't pay for sites that don't offer full-text RSS (or email newsletters, for some sites) for subscribers.

Maybe not considered a solution, but: print.

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.

Because AI bots will scrape the full text RSS.

How is a web page with the full text more resistant to that than an RSS feed with the full text?

Some RSS feeds have the full text and are transitioning users to the full content on the web page.

RSS scraping is just 100x easier and some publications have taken notice.

I've seen some publications are transitioning to extreme hard paywalls and are even harder to scrape.

i think rsshub can help with this, but im not 100% sure. its something you have to self host yourself, or pay a service like pikapods to run it for you

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

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

> 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 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 tried subscribing to pcgamer ( as in, I literally paid for it ) two years ago but this didn’t seem to change structurally the amount of ads i was getting. I also tried to contact them directly but couldn’t find a relevant email address to reach out to.

I now use an ad blocker instead. I’m not proud of it, but being actively hostile to me is something I don’t quite understand especially when I’m trying hard to give them money.

This reminds me of the bug I experienced on gcp console with dark reader. Somehow this caused a memory leak, and one could watch the page slowly consume GBs of memory. I once came back from lunch to see it had eaten all ram on my MBP and had consumed a massive amount of swap.

I would not have expected a 'dark mode' extension to cause that.

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1172/

TheVerge launched a full RSS Feed for paid subscribers about a year ago and I've never so happily subscribed to something.

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

Sadly many people wouldn't even notice 500MB anymore. That's kind of the point. A PS2 game was 4GB. Now a single update patch is 50GB. Software stopped being designed for everyone a long time ago. It's just more obvious when it's a 500MB article about RSS readers.

With adblock loaded, the page loaded a whopping 10MB, after scrolling all the way to the bottom.

So yeah. It might be bad, but I can only recommend everyone on low-data-rates/plans to always use an adblock/contentblocker.

(169 requests, 10.59MB / 3.28 MB transferred), total time 1.10 min)

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.

They just doubled the "get out of watching ads" fee. Also, most of their good content is now in the "Now playing" section, where you can't seek around or choose episodes. Of course, it also has unskippable ads, even if you paid to remove them.

I strongly recommend purchasing a USB bluray player + then buying shiny metal disks to feed it (or finding your public library, of course!)

Used + overstock disks are << $10. I go to the store and grab what I want. I typically leave with about 30 movies / TV seasons for $100. They're far higher quality than the content that is included with amazon prime, and typically cost about 10% as much as the "buy movie" price for the same film.

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.

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...

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.

I'm just going to blacklist this kind of website. I get that they need advertising to survive. But taken to this extreme, it's just disrespectful to their readers.

And websites wonder why I refuse to turn off my adblocker.

37 millibar? That's quite the bird's eye view.

Looking at the title, I was confused why a recommendation of some random PC gamer is interesting. Capitalization is important.

You don't need RSS; you need AdBlock.

Try next filters:

  www.pcgamer.com##aside#affiliate-disclaimer
  www.pcgamer.com##aside[data-component-name="Recirculation:ArticleRiver"]
  www.pcgamer.com##aside[data-mrf-recirculation="article-river-stacked"]
  www.pcgamer.com##div.slice-container-newsletterForm
  www.pcgamer.com##div[data-widget-type="deal"]
  www.pcgamer.com##span.article-continues-below
  www.pcgamer.com#$#div.widget-area-group {display: block;}
  www.pcgamer.com#$#div.widget-area.basis-full {width: 100%;}
  www.pcgamer.com$$div[id="slice-container-popularBox"]
  www.pcgamer.com$$script[type="text/javascript"][data-id]
  ||pcgamer.com$to=~viafoura.co,script

It's 3.60 MB with NoScript enabled.

Trying to use the internet without an adblocker is honestly a tragic and harrowing experience.

Wipr 2 ad blocker for Safari reduced the transfer size of PC World article to 3,5 MB.

The modern Web is truly unusable without an aggressive DNS filter and/or uBlock.

Being alerted to, and preventing this, should be a built-in feature of the browser.

noscript, ublock origin, reader view: the referenced page loads in 2s on a bad connection and downloads no ads while remaining perfectly readable.

Browsing and not using these tools nowadays is volunteering for a bad time, IMO.

How much would that be costing them? Thats a lot of data to serve for no reason.

+1 for FreshRSS (recommended at the bottom of the PC Gamer article). I just started my mass migration to self-hosting (it's way better in 2026 than it used to be), and I'm very pleased with the FreshRSS webapp and NetNewsWire integration. I consider it a solid hedge against enshittification. I probably won't go full self-hosting, but I'm enjoying the move.

That's outrageous—advertisements have really gone too far.

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.

it's relatively easy for an ai to write such an article now, just open all websites and gather metrics while crawling...

and they wonder why we use adblockers.

ima start browsing the web via lynx 100% now

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.

in warhammer40k surfing without adblocker would be herasy

- can we get a trend on HN here of all the websites doing this currnetly?

- i read a post of NYTimes the other day, can we get people to submit this stuff which is far more useful than half the vibe coded AI slop apps?

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

Over on slashdot, they're currently running a story "US Cable TV Industry Faces 'Dramatic Collapse' as Local Operators Shut Down - or Become ISPs"

I can't believe the year has finally come! I also cannot believe the year starts with a "2".

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.

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.

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...

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?)

3150x2210 is sort of a normal resolution for retina displays. It's close to a native panel resolution on iOS, but they do this dumb fractional scaling thing because it was too hard to backport support for high DPI displays to MacOS X. Anyway, that resolution is so unreadable on current macos that they hide it behind a "show all resolutions" toggle. The default is 50% that (1/4 as many pixels), and they only let you go up to about 60-66% of native resolution unless you click the override.

So, the screenshot is probably a semi-upscaled image of a ~ 1920x1200 desktop.

What's with the aspect ratio, though?

wtf is this tittle

Typical example of a fraudster

Holy shit that is horrifying.

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!

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