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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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'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
> 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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
Even with good bandwidth and unlimited data, it’s still disrespectful.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's still useful for comprehending the scale of volume. The useful part of the article is a few KB.
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)
You mean Ublock, not Unlock, I assume?
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.
The person who wrote the article and the people in charge of the site are different.
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.
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.
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...
Thank God for uMatrix. Seriously, I don't know how I lived without that thing. Load times on everything are at least 30% faster.
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'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.
Lighthouse can sometimes find RSS feeds for pages that don’t show an RSS button on the page:
https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder
> 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.
Maybe not considered a solution, but: print.
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?
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..
For a lot of sites Firefox's reader mode is great at bypassing paywalls, just turn it on & refresh
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
it's relatively easy for an ai to write such an article now, just open all websites and gather metrics while crawling...
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.
This is the problem. There's no good replacement for Reddit right now, and Digg just died again.
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.
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 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