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...
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.
I know at least on att prepaid they don't meter their own websites, if you have completely used your data up you can still access the website at normal speeds to change plans and stuff
What does "negligence of fugality" even mean here?
There's dozens of things to optimize for in software development, with resource usage being only a few of them (as CPU, memory, and network are different targets). Who are you to decide which are the most important? And if you think that you can do a better job at picking the right trades while keeping companies in business, then you would be able to make a lot of money doing so.
But you won't. The actual reason why companies (and even personal and open-source software projects) make these "wasteful" design decisions is because normal users have clearly indicated their priorities. The majority of people would rather trade some performance for a "modern" web design, and have heavy videos rather than lightweight text to give a product overview, and want that one particular feature that adds cat ears to their profile photo and if the competition has it they'll switch.
Do I think these priorities are wrong and stupid? Absolutely. I hate bloated web pages and slow applications. But empirically, with billions of dollars of evidence, these are decisions driven by users' and customers' priorities.
Look at sites built for professionals, like Digikey and McMaster-Carr - far better designed and more performant, because they cater to customers that care about those things.
It's extremely obvious what users prioritize. And if you think that "they don't know what's best for them, but I do" - what makes you any better than a member of the economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?
That’s precisely the elephant in the room. Money is a distortion and filtering lense that makes obvious things look inexistent until the wall it renders invisible is hit — at high the highest speed it could reach before that.
Reality is extremely poorly summarized within the frame of a single scalar value.
>And if you think that "they don't know what's best for them, but I do" - what makes you any better than a member of the economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?
First of all, there no necessity to go into a you/I or them/us mindset. Also it’s not because some group don’t know what’s best for themselves that any other group will know better — whatever the label given the this other group: "I" or "too-big-to-fail Inc.".
This whole message also seem to assume some kind of full rationalization based on user priorities. But user base to a large extent takes what’s the most obviously thrown at their face. They sometime can tweak their applications if it does give some options to do so, or switch to some alternative if there are not trapped in a defacto oligopoly.
Do people want LLMs thrown at their face at every single corner of their digital interactions? Or is the the "throw it at every single surface indiscriminately and see what stick" driven by the hope that something will stick and make the capital venture lottery produce a few winner take it all?
How are users choosing this stuff? Do you have an example of two competing services offering the same features, one bloated and one not, and users locked to the bloated one?
To my mind users are simply using what’s put in front of them. They lack the technical knowledge to know better things are possible and even if they did they don’t have any way to advocate for it. Over half of US users use an ad blocker:
>The actual reason why companies (and even personal and open-source software projects) make these "wasteful" design decisions is because normal users have clearly indicated their priorities.
You really think it's the users asking for bloated webpages? Reddit has been pushing their reddit redesign forever now. No users ever asked for it. There is a large community of users that insist on using the old.reddit interface, and reddit has been chipping away by slowly breaking more and more things (most recently, the mod page).
Compare that with hacker news or craig's list. They're still super light weight, fit for purpose, and I am forever thankful the webdevs (dang,etc) responsible for them did not succumb to the temptation to 'web 2.0/SPA' it.
It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks. See also, how nobody builds 'starter' homes anymore. There's a huge unmet market for it, but homebuilders find building mcMansions to be more profitable, so that's what gets built.
> 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.
Not sure if you are aware that with throttled 2G slow you can't even open a package tracking website these days, because the connection times out before you have downloaded all their asset dependencies. And those kind of websites do not support resumes of downloads (or partial content requests).
So you're stuck in a loop of not being able to use the web because the websites keep downloading stuff you don't need.
It's only usable for a limited number of sites that still work with most JS and images blocked (and of course no video ads). I doubt many tech illiterates are aware of how to constrain their data usage on the web or avoid AAA apps with obscene volumes of data transfer. Another issue is it's not just 2G but also heavily deprioritized.
This is an easy fix: Just cut off their data after it runs out instead of falling back to 2G speeds. Sounds like a win-win for both the data provider and the user.
The obvious easy fix is to give them unlimited data. If the intent is to give them internet, they should give them internet that functions for the modern web.
There's a very wide band between "2G" and "unlimited" to explore.
Cell phone systems already have some tiering built in, at least based on the fine print I've read about my plans. Once I run out of "official data" I fall back to low-priority usage, but the cell system is generally so well-provisioned nowadays that I hardly notice. In 2026, one must take explicit action to force people back to 2G. Nothing would stop these plans from, say, simply always being "low priority usage" but at full speed, and for the most part this would satisfy everyone.
This sort of clause reeks of "it was written into a contract 15 years ago and nobody has even so much as thought about it since then" rather than some sort of choice.
Data caps are to an extent “fake”, in that telcos’ costs aren’t measured in how many bytes their customers download/upload. Telcos’ costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.
And for popular websites, they will cache lots of content on their own network or peer directly with data centers so they don’t have to pay for the bandwidth there. The routers will continue routing and the switches will continue switching whether you download 5GBs or 5TBs.
One more way to understand how much of a scam mobile data caps are, is that the same ISP will sell you unlimited fiber plans even though essentially your traffic goes through the same backbone.
Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers, but they don’t need to be as low as they are today.
> Telcos’ costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.
In the long run, all costs are variable. Phone companies lack the bandwidth to provide all their customers unlimited data all the time. Most of them can’t even provide full speeds to their existing customers at peak times. If they gave everyone unlimited data they’d have to get more bandwidth, and they’d pass on every penny of the cost.
> Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers
Data caps make congestion worse, because you are more likely to restrict where you use data and people are predictable. You'll no longer use bits everywhere because you care less, you'll use it where everyone else does.
https-everywhere does indeed prevent transparent proxying by ISPs. Mostly this isn't an issue: site owners are less likely to have their content tampered with by a content distribution network than by an ISP, and have full control over which CDN(s) are allowed to act on their behalf. Larger content providers operate their own CDNs, of course.
In the case of TFA, PC Gamer isn't directly consuming the bandwidth with their own servers on their own domain name. It's an ad distribution network doing that, and odds are reasonable they're already colocated someplace with your ISP and the bandwidth consumed by ads is totally irrelevant to everyone except the poor sap at the home end of the last mile.
Unless we nut up and ban gambling, there will never be a shortage of broke motherfuckers who should be able to make ends meet with their job but simply never will be able to. You have no idea how badly gambling suppresses a large subset of the working class.
I'm not really affected by it yet (I've been able to resist gambling more than a self-imposed $20 at a time, which I can afford, and one time I realized I wanted to break my limit, I realized it was an important moment to nut up and walk away). But I understand that there are people it's really affecting. So I'm all in favor of "NO more gambling".
But even if that wasn't a thing - the way it's ruined watching sports now, with the constant odds flashing, etc, I'd ban it JUST for that, on top of all the detrimental effects on society.
Which, as a reminder, was the status quo just a decade or so ago.
I don't remember "I can't throw money away on this football play" being a massive society wide problem that needed fixing in 2010, pretty sure everyone could bet with their friends already.
I dont think most people here see that, or even have the willingness to see that. The same was true for the opioid epidemic. Had it hit a group with any political capital there would have been laws passed and the sacklers would have been not just painted as villains, they would have been castrated a quarter of a century ago.
Just wait 15 years when the middle class has been struggling with easily accessible gambling and it can't be explained as problem of character. There will be laws passed and people prosecuted or successfully sued.
Many of those targeted by the sacklers did start as white, middle class, etc. or even white, upper class.
Those folks that did fall to it, then became (often) lower class while failing to it.
The thing to realize, is that the upper classes ‘eat their own’ just like any other. It’s why Trump is as frantic as he is, he knows what will happen when he stops being ‘useful’/necessary.
Note that many European countries have already got rid of their 3G networks completely [0]. So it's either "you have 4G/5G" or "the internet is pretty much unusable", nothing in between.
As someone living in a European country with no 3G network, my experience with mobile data is that when my phone fails to find a 4G signal and switches to 2G (pretty much only happens in remote areas, thankfully), I can as well send my packets using a pigeon carrier, they're going to arrive to the destination sooner.
2G speeds isn't really full access to "the internet" for some parts of the internet.
My experience with 2G speeds is:
1. Open job application site
2. Upload resume pdf
3. Upload required picture of ID
4. Server's nginx config has a hard-coded timeout after 1 minute. Connection error
5. Try to upload again
6. Connection error
A huge number of pieces of the web have hardcoded timeouts and limits designed to stop slowloris style attacks, and if your connection is slow enough, those will prevent you from ever being able to complete some tasks.
I tried to explain slow loris to a non technical friend, he thought I was joking. The concept of the internet in this day and age is very "cloudy" for a regular user, all pun intended.
This thread is about how a static text article loaded 500 megs in the background. How would someone prepare for that exactly? This is effectively malware as far as your bandwidth is concerned.
I’ve used travel SIMs that only give you about 5GB. You avoid using the web at all, unless you are on WiFi. You can use maps, train and bus apps, banking apps, messaging, AirBnB etc, but not the web. If you go to some place and they want to use a QR code to buy a ticket or use a menu you may as well forget about it.
People on government assistance are just casually going to Starbucks for free wifi? They probably don’t even have a reliable way to get around. Let them eat cake?
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.
It’s not only the providers. 2G is 120kbit max on a lot of networks and 50kbit on average. Even a 1MB site, that is lean by today’s standards will take 160 seconds to load.
2G is really from a different age. Does anyone remember WAP and i-mode? I was certainly not able to afford data back then, but that is what all the business’y types were raving about.
True, and also when you actually go to apply for a job it often kicks you out to another website, that will use who knows how many mbs? And you have to fill in your details again and again. Each one a different flavour. Sometimes saying the same thing multiple times for the same job ad.
Non technical people are afraid to block adds on their Android device since Google might find out about it and decides to eliminate their account; I was not able to convince them otherwise.
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.
When the power's out and broadband is down, if you are lucky the cell network is still up. However, everyone fails over to it simultaneously, so there's no way you'll get 2G speeds out of your 5G plan with 5 bars.
I throttled my browser dev tools to 2G and clicked reload. After 2+ minutes, it popped up a "It looks like you are on a slow connection" modal (sometimes this loads on top of the outage info, obscuring the data you want!), so I clicked "Use low bandwidth version". After 51 seconds, the debugger says page load is finished (for the low bandwidth one), but the page is just a white background, and the browser "loading" animation is still running.
After 2.17 more minutes, I get a form where you can type in an address + a bunch of irrelevant info. I typed an address, waited a minute, then typed this paragraph. After 1.5 minutes, it showed my address in the autocomplete menu, and I clicked it.
33 seconds later, it started loading a google maps ajax. 47 seconds after that, it displayed a header, with a white body. 1.33 minutes later, ignoring styling, it returned the string "power is on".
(No map, etc, at this point.)
Had this been a real outage in a storm, I'd be standing outside in the rain, or in a situation where getting cell coverage for more than 30 seconds at a time is impossible if you're holding the phone. I usually just put the phone on a carefully placed chair, then back away slowly.
Anyway it takes 9 minutes under ideal scenarios (no drops) to send 30 bytes of address, and an 11 byte response. 44 bytes / 540 seconds = 0.08 bytes per second good put.
For reference, voyager can send 20 bytes per second, so it's 250x faster than this. Morse code / telegraphs are typically sent at 1.5 words per minute, where a word is 15 characters, so 0.375 bytes per second = 4.6x faster.
Remember, these are simulated conditions for the PG&E site. My record best time getting it to load during a major outage is 45 minutes, not 9.
Thank you. I often get people responding that 2G speed will work fine for email, chat, Google Maps etc. Maybe if I installed an IMAP client on their phone, maybe.
But I can promise you from sitting with them dozens of times things like Google Maps are unusable once the connection is throttled. It might load some of the map, some of the time. But it never loads all of it and it is just plain unworkable. Even if it loads some of it it takes so long that the busses have gone past by the time they've tried to figure out what direction they need to go.
Google maps works okay on slow connections if you download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand (not that non-technical unemployed people should be expected to do that).
The worst thing is load balancers with a 10 or 20 second timeout, because there's almost nothing you can do other than use Opera Mini or something.
Because Google Maps is all they know? I've been on the web for 30+ years (wrote my own html home page by hand in 1995 while doing my master's) and have just now heard of "Osmand" for maybe the 2nd time in my life. The other being a few months ago. If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it?
I remember 10+ years ago I had to do my on-boarding paperwork from a research station on the Greenland ice sheet. Workday would just not work with the high latency (but otherwise, not terribly slow) connection. I had to remote desktop to a CONUS computer and use a browser there in order for it to work...
There is a spot near me near a local college that is a worthless dead zone for data.
The signal is terrible, but it’s there. You can talk on the phone or send texts.
Surfing is horrible. At times you get great speeds. Two seconds later it feels like slow dial up. Really that’s what it feels like most of the time, any kind of speed is the anomaly.
As said in other comments, very few apps actually handle this well. They seem to expect that you either have a good connection or nothing.
It’s been like that for a decade plus. I assume it’s just overloaded and will never be fixed.
0 of course, but wasn't 3G all shut down in the US in 2022 to open up the airspace?
One of those HN myths that comes from only being willing to Google (or ChatGPT) information, rather than encountering it in the real world.
3G still exists in rural and remote areas that no major carrier wants to serve, at least as of April, 2025 — the last time I did a round of real-world web testing. Next round is in September. Maybe with 5G in the cities, some hand-me-down 4G equipment has made it to the places where I test.
I guess what I am getting from this thread is, there is 3G service out there in the wild. However, in locations where 4G and 5G is available, 3G has been phased out
This doesn’t jibe with my experience trying to make phone calls on rural highways, where it seems there is no signal whatsoever more often than not.
I suppose this could be because ATT-Verizon-T-Mobile used to have 2G in that area (which was discontinued — 900Mhz analog voice band, also decommissioned) has moved on and left swathes of the US without signal, whereas, certain areas (commenter omits an example) never were served by major telecoms and have “evolved” their tech more slowly, so 3G is not decommissioned in those places. In that sense yes there is no contradiction. It still feels like we’ve gone backwards since there are places I used to be able to make a phone call that are now considered remote area with satellite SOS being you’re only way to reach someone
The big-3 have nationwide coverage (well, at least 2 of them).
But even beside that, AFAICT USCellular shut down 3G in January 2024, Appalachian Wireless in Dec 2022, Cellcom in Dec 2023, and C Spire sometime in 2022.
I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.
Thank you for proving my point, that people on HN falsely think they know more than others because they can Google a link, even though what's happening on the ground is entirely different.
Reality ≠ policy papers, press releases, or web links.
I used to have an extremely cheap phone plan that had 500MB data, then 64kbps for the rest of the month.
You'd be surprised how far you can get with that. IRC works just fine (as long as you use Quassel w/ Quasseldroid), HN works well, so does reddit (via redreader). RSS readers and wikipedia work as well, and for general web browsing you can set up a readability proxy (basically Firefox' Reader Mode, but server-side). And of course email works really well, too.
Been there, done that, and all without the benefit of a home Internet connection. I also created a couple of scripts that I could run on my desktop computer to install new software or update my operating system. After running the scripts on my computer, I would wander over to the library with nothing more than my phone to download the packages along with grabbing some videos to watch offline.
The issue isn't really living with 500 MB/month of data. For most people, it will simply be knowing that you can do that. The next issue they will face is having the technical ability to actually do so. Then, once you've done all of that, the question will remain: will they be interested in the stripped down Internet. A lot of us who frequent HN may be since the results will still reflect our interests. There are people on IRC who we would want to talk to. There is a slant towards tech sites with RSS. And so on. That isn't going to be reflected in sites targeted at a general audience.
Sure, me and you and everyone here can open a shell connection and do everything with text and it'll work great on 64kbps.
Some of these guys have been locked up for 40 years straight. They're not doing all that extra stuff. They want to go on Indeed or Monster or YouTube. One job site I had to load on my desktop to find out why it wasn't working for them, only to discover the pages had a 250MB payload of random crap downloading, including videos.
The COTS solution for some web browsing is Opera Mini, which may still work? It also uses a proxy to prerender and compress websites, and worked ok at 2G speeds last I used it. It used to work well as a java applet and made the wider internet functional on feature phones. Very solid software.
But as a practical matter, what people rely on phones for are services that are app-based. Good luck completing a Venmo transaction or any amount of banking.
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".
Actually, this is based on my personal experience. I don't use a smartphone for internet. Many of the places where I've tried it, the "free wifi" doesn't work. Maybe the wifi is there, but the uplink is 2G speed, or it has a web sign-in that doesn't work any more. Or maybe an employee accidentally unplugged the router. Days/weeks ago. And "no one complained about it".
I've traveled Greyhound and Amtrak recently. They both advertise free wifi, but it's quite clear they no longer prioritize keeping it working.
Libraries are (probably/hopefully) an exception. But, seeing as Starbucks has been wanting to discourage people from hanging out in recent months, I wouldn't count on Starbucks wifi being reliable.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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!
> 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.
Libraries just got an increase in funding in the US in the 2026 appropriations bills.
> 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
No-one's arbitrarily denying things. It's about what should and shouldn't be given as free things that other people work to pay for.
"It's UNFAIR!" is the anthem of whiny children. If these people would benefit from access to Youtube, and we can provide it to them trivially, then by all means, let them have it. If it upsets you when people are given things for free, that's really a "you problem."
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
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.
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.
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."
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).
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.
The shitty thing is that serving the under-served is almost by definition (and perhaps by design) not lucrative so such folks continue to go under-served.
As we scale our products we think a lot about p99 and ensure we have all the 9s of uptime but even then we ignore the small percentage of folks who can't even begin to load our sites.
Thanks for sharing and for your service, sir/madam!
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.
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
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.
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.
A reader who hits their mobile data cap after thirty minutes on your site will not be viewing any more of your ads for the next month. But if businesses were capable of thinking more than exactly one step ahead for any action they take, the tech industry wouldn't be such a shithole in the first place, of course.
I imagine people remember what site they were on when the data usage warnings came up, and they don't come back.
The question I guess is really if PC Gamer earns more by sending 100 mb / minute and chasing some eyeballs away faster, than by using a reasonable amount of data and losing eyeballs at the normal rate of attrition for written word outlets.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
This drives me nuts. It's been going on for years that a simple "if this, do that" deal is encoded in an overly elaborate 10 minute long YouTube video where at least 9 minutes of it is filler. You know, when you start skimming the comments to see if anyone bothered with summarizing it.
AI amplifies the problem by making it easier to produce filler, but the problem is whatever metrics are behind the monetization. You need users to "engage" with your content for at least x amount of time to earn y amount of money, while instead the earnings should be relative to and directly derived from how useful the content is to how many users.
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 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.
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.
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.
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’.
> 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?
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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'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
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.
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
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.
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".
> 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 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
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.
+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.
> 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.
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 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...
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.
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
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.
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.
I’m honestly amazed they tried that. It’s been so long, it felt like a play to cache in on the name but I feel like a huge chunk of people don’t really remember it or weren’t even around for it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
I know at least on att prepaid they don't meter their own websites, if you have completely used your data up you can still access the website at normal speeds to change plans and stuff
What does "negligence of fugality" even mean here?
There's dozens of things to optimize for in software development, with resource usage being only a few of them (as CPU, memory, and network are different targets). Who are you to decide which are the most important? And if you think that you can do a better job at picking the right trades while keeping companies in business, then you would be able to make a lot of money doing so.
But you won't. The actual reason why companies (and even personal and open-source software projects) make these "wasteful" design decisions is because normal users have clearly indicated their priorities. The majority of people would rather trade some performance for a "modern" web design, and have heavy videos rather than lightweight text to give a product overview, and want that one particular feature that adds cat ears to their profile photo and if the competition has it they'll switch.
Do I think these priorities are wrong and stupid? Absolutely. I hate bloated web pages and slow applications. But empirically, with billions of dollars of evidence, these are decisions driven by users' and customers' priorities.
Look at sites built for professionals, like Digikey and McMaster-Carr - far better designed and more performant, because they cater to customers that care about those things.
It's extremely obvious what users prioritize. And if you think that "they don't know what's best for them, but I do" - what makes you any better than a member of the economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?
>would be able to make a lot of money doing so.
That’s precisely the elephant in the room. Money is a distortion and filtering lense that makes obvious things look inexistent until the wall it renders invisible is hit — at high the highest speed it could reach before that.
Reality is extremely poorly summarized within the frame of a single scalar value.
>And if you think that "they don't know what's best for them, but I do" - what makes you any better than a member of the economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?
First of all, there no necessity to go into a you/I or them/us mindset. Also it’s not because some group don’t know what’s best for themselves that any other group will know better — whatever the label given the this other group: "I" or "too-big-to-fail Inc.".
This whole message also seem to assume some kind of full rationalization based on user priorities. But user base to a large extent takes what’s the most obviously thrown at their face. They sometime can tweak their applications if it does give some options to do so, or switch to some alternative if there are not trapped in a defacto oligopoly.
Do people want LLMs thrown at their face at every single corner of their digital interactions? Or is the the "throw it at every single surface indiscriminately and see what stick" driven by the hope that something will stick and make the capital venture lottery produce a few winner take it all?
How are users choosing this stuff? Do you have an example of two competing services offering the same features, one bloated and one not, and users locked to the bloated one?
To my mind users are simply using what’s put in front of them. They lack the technical knowledge to know better things are possible and even if they did they don’t have any way to advocate for it. Over half of US users use an ad blocker:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/
That alone suggests to me that when given a choice users actually do care.
>The actual reason why companies (and even personal and open-source software projects) make these "wasteful" design decisions is because normal users have clearly indicated their priorities.
You really think it's the users asking for bloated webpages? Reddit has been pushing their reddit redesign forever now. No users ever asked for it. There is a large community of users that insist on using the old.reddit interface, and reddit has been chipping away by slowly breaking more and more things (most recently, the mod page).
Compare that with hacker news or craig's list. They're still super light weight, fit for purpose, and I am forever thankful the webdevs (dang,etc) responsible for them did not succumb to the temptation to 'web 2.0/SPA' it.
It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks. See also, how nobody builds 'starter' homes anymore. There's a huge unmet market for it, but homebuilders find building mcMansions to be more profitable, so that's what gets built.
> Who are you to decide which are the most important?
The customer.
> 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.
Not sure if you are aware that with throttled 2G slow you can't even open a package tracking website these days, because the connection times out before you have downloaded all their asset dependencies. And those kind of websites do not support resumes of downloads (or partial content requests).
So you're stuck in a loop of not being able to use the web because the websites keep downloading stuff you don't need.
It's only usable for a limited number of sites that still work with most JS and images blocked (and of course no video ads). I doubt many tech illiterates are aware of how to constrain their data usage on the web or avoid AAA apps with obscene volumes of data transfer. Another issue is it's not just 2G but also heavily deprioritized.
This is an easy fix: Just cut off their data after it runs out instead of falling back to 2G speeds. Sounds like a win-win for both the data provider and the user.
I hope you're joking.
The obvious easy fix is to give them unlimited data. If the intent is to give them internet, they should give them internet that functions for the modern web.
There's a very wide band between "2G" and "unlimited" to explore.
Cell phone systems already have some tiering built in, at least based on the fine print I've read about my plans. Once I run out of "official data" I fall back to low-priority usage, but the cell system is generally so well-provisioned nowadays that I hardly notice. In 2026, one must take explicit action to force people back to 2G. Nothing would stop these plans from, say, simply always being "low priority usage" but at full speed, and for the most part this would satisfy everyone.
This sort of clause reeks of "it was written into a contract 15 years ago and nobody has even so much as thought about it since then" rather than some sort of choice.
Unlimited data! You make it sound so easy.
I hope you’re still joking.
Data caps are to an extent “fake”, in that telcos’ costs aren’t measured in how many bytes their customers download/upload. Telcos’ costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.
And for popular websites, they will cache lots of content on their own network or peer directly with data centers so they don’t have to pay for the bandwidth there. The routers will continue routing and the switches will continue switching whether you download 5GBs or 5TBs.
One more way to understand how much of a scam mobile data caps are, is that the same ISP will sell you unlimited fiber plans even though essentially your traffic goes through the same backbone.
Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers, but they don’t need to be as low as they are today.
> Telcos’ costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.
In the long run, all costs are variable. Phone companies lack the bandwidth to provide all their customers unlimited data all the time. Most of them can’t even provide full speeds to their existing customers at peak times. If they gave everyone unlimited data they’d have to get more bandwidth, and they’d pass on every penny of the cost.
> Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers
Data caps make congestion worse, because you are more likely to restrict where you use data and people are predictable. You'll no longer use bits everywhere because you care less, you'll use it where everyone else does.
Didn't https everywhere ruin caching? Unless you MITM everyone like CloudFlare.
https-everywhere does indeed prevent transparent proxying by ISPs. Mostly this isn't an issue: site owners are less likely to have their content tampered with by a content distribution network than by an ISP, and have full control over which CDN(s) are allowed to act on their behalf. Larger content providers operate their own CDNs, of course.
In the case of TFA, PC Gamer isn't directly consuming the bandwidth with their own servers on their own domain name. It's an ad distribution network doing that, and odds are reasonable they're already colocated someplace with your ISP and the bandwidth consumed by ads is totally irrelevant to everyone except the poor sap at the home end of the last mile.
It was seemingly easy for every cell provider to give it to every teenager in america just 10 years ago. What is a few marginalized adults in 2026?
They won’t be marginalized if we don’t shit on them somehow.
Unless we nut up and ban gambling, there will never be a shortage of broke motherfuckers who should be able to make ends meet with their job but simply never will be able to. You have no idea how badly gambling suppresses a large subset of the working class.
I'm not really affected by it yet (I've been able to resist gambling more than a self-imposed $20 at a time, which I can afford, and one time I realized I wanted to break my limit, I realized it was an important moment to nut up and walk away). But I understand that there are people it's really affecting. So I'm all in favor of "NO more gambling".
But even if that wasn't a thing - the way it's ruined watching sports now, with the constant odds flashing, etc, I'd ban it JUST for that, on top of all the detrimental effects on society.
Which, as a reminder, was the status quo just a decade or so ago.
I don't remember "I can't throw money away on this football play" being a massive society wide problem that needed fixing in 2010, pretty sure everyone could bet with their friends already.
I dont think most people here see that, or even have the willingness to see that. The same was true for the opioid epidemic. Had it hit a group with any political capital there would have been laws passed and the sacklers would have been not just painted as villains, they would have been castrated a quarter of a century ago.
Just wait 15 years when the middle class has been struggling with easily accessible gambling and it can't be explained as problem of character. There will be laws passed and people prosecuted or successfully sued.
Many of those targeted by the sacklers did start as white, middle class, etc. or even white, upper class.
Those folks that did fall to it, then became (often) lower class while failing to it.
The thing to realize, is that the upper classes ‘eat their own’ just like any other. It’s why Trump is as frantic as he is, he knows what will happen when he stops being ‘useful’/necessary.
They’re already given unlimited data? It just gets throttled the 2G speeds.
They can also just go to the local library or Starbucks for the WiFi if they need more.
Please go try and do anything on the internet at 2G speeds in todays world.
You can barely even use FB messenger (you need to get messenger-lite).
I only know this cuz tmobile would give you free 2g all over europe. it was JUST BARELY helpful. mostly just sms and email.
google maps was unusable etc. This only got worse over the years.
They now give you free 3G and it's bearable. 2G is insanely slow in the 2020+ world.
2G ~= 5 KB/s. That means 40 seconds just to download a properly optimized react bundle.
5MB site? 16+ minutes.
> They now give you free 3G and it's bearable
Note that many European countries have already got rid of their 3G networks completely [0]. So it's either "you have 4G/5G" or "the internet is pretty much unusable", nothing in between.
As someone living in a European country with no 3G network, my experience with mobile data is that when my phone fails to find a 4G signal and switches to 2G (pretty much only happens in remote areas, thankfully), I can as well send my packets using a pigeon carrier, they're going to arrive to the destination sooner.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G#Phase-out
Add New Zealand to the places that have turned off 3G.
Not really relevant here, because it's not real 2G/3G, but 4G throttled to 2G speed.
2G speeds isn't really full access to "the internet" for some parts of the internet.
My experience with 2G speeds is:
1. Open job application site
2. Upload resume pdf
3. Upload required picture of ID
4. Server's nginx config has a hard-coded timeout after 1 minute. Connection error
5. Try to upload again
6. Connection error
A huge number of pieces of the web have hardcoded timeouts and limits designed to stop slowloris style attacks, and if your connection is slow enough, those will prevent you from ever being able to complete some tasks.
I tried to explain slow loris to a non technical friend, he thought I was joking. The concept of the internet in this day and age is very "cloudy" for a regular user, all pun intended.
You'll need to go to the library then, if you can't manage to watch your data use and use your free phone only for important usage.
I've paid for 2GB/mo for years now. I think I ran out once.
This thread is about how a static text article loaded 500 megs in the background. How would someone prepare for that exactly? This is effectively malware as far as your bandwidth is concerned.
I’ve used travel SIMs that only give you about 5GB. You avoid using the web at all, unless you are on WiFi. You can use maps, train and bus apps, banking apps, messaging, AirBnB etc, but not the web. If you go to some place and they want to use a QR code to buy a ticket or use a menu you may as well forget about it.
With a pay as you go google fi plan... the trick is to use firefox + uBO. If a site opens in the default Android web view, you're fucked.
People on government assistance are just casually going to Starbucks for free wifi? They probably don’t even have a reliable way to get around. Let them eat cake?
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.
It’s not only the providers. 2G is 120kbit max on a lot of networks and 50kbit on average. Even a 1MB site, that is lean by today’s standards will take 160 seconds to load.
2G is really from a different age. Does anyone remember WAP and i-mode? I was certainly not able to afford data back then, but that is what all the business’y types were raving about.
Yeah that’s true — 2G was in the WAP days. Forgot about that.
How are they supposed to know which job search platforms (app or web) aren’t going to blow their bandwidth limits?
True, and also when you actually go to apply for a job it often kicks you out to another website, that will use who knows how many mbs? And you have to fill in your details again and again. Each one a different flavour. Sometimes saying the same thing multiple times for the same job ad.
Non technical people are afraid to block adds on their Android device since Google might find out about it and decides to eliminate their account; I was not able to convince them otherwise.
> 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.
by email you mean pop3, imap and smtp or the heavy html web client?
I doubt email would work, even with imap or pop3. I get a lot of spam per day, and imap clients typically download unread messages.
I guess you could configure it not to do that, or write your own imap client with better behavior -- on your 2G smartphone.
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?"
lol, right?
sounds like someone never tried connection that slow on modern sites
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.
Here's my favorite example of this:
https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/
When the power's out and broadband is down, if you are lucky the cell network is still up. However, everyone fails over to it simultaneously, so there's no way you'll get 2G speeds out of your 5G plan with 5 bars.
I throttled my browser dev tools to 2G and clicked reload. After 2+ minutes, it popped up a "It looks like you are on a slow connection" modal (sometimes this loads on top of the outage info, obscuring the data you want!), so I clicked "Use low bandwidth version". After 51 seconds, the debugger says page load is finished (for the low bandwidth one), but the page is just a white background, and the browser "loading" animation is still running.
After 2.17 more minutes, I get a form where you can type in an address + a bunch of irrelevant info. I typed an address, waited a minute, then typed this paragraph. After 1.5 minutes, it showed my address in the autocomplete menu, and I clicked it.
33 seconds later, it started loading a google maps ajax. 47 seconds after that, it displayed a header, with a white body. 1.33 minutes later, ignoring styling, it returned the string "power is on".
(No map, etc, at this point.)
Had this been a real outage in a storm, I'd be standing outside in the rain, or in a situation where getting cell coverage for more than 30 seconds at a time is impossible if you're holding the phone. I usually just put the phone on a carefully placed chair, then back away slowly.
Anyway it takes 9 minutes under ideal scenarios (no drops) to send 30 bytes of address, and an 11 byte response. 44 bytes / 540 seconds = 0.08 bytes per second good put.
For reference, voyager can send 20 bytes per second, so it's 250x faster than this. Morse code / telegraphs are typically sent at 1.5 words per minute, where a word is 15 characters, so 0.375 bytes per second = 4.6x faster.
Remember, these are simulated conditions for the PG&E site. My record best time getting it to load during a major outage is 45 minutes, not 9.
Thank you. I often get people responding that 2G speed will work fine for email, chat, Google Maps etc. Maybe if I installed an IMAP client on their phone, maybe.
But I can promise you from sitting with them dozens of times things like Google Maps are unusable once the connection is throttled. It might load some of the map, some of the time. But it never loads all of it and it is just plain unworkable. Even if it loads some of it it takes so long that the busses have gone past by the time they've tried to figure out what direction they need to go.
Google maps works okay on slow connections if you download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand (not that non-technical unemployed people should be expected to do that).
The worst thing is load balancers with a 10 or 20 second timeout, because there's almost nothing you can do other than use Opera Mini or something.
> Google maps works okay on slow connections if you download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand
At that point, why would you use Google Maps at all? Osmand will do the same thing, and requires no connection.
Because Google Maps is all they know? I've been on the web for 30+ years (wrote my own html home page by hand in 1995 while doing my master's) and have just now heard of "Osmand" for maybe the 2nd time in my life. The other being a few months ago. If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it?
I remember 10+ years ago I had to do my on-boarding paperwork from a research station on the Greenland ice sheet. Workday would just not work with the high latency (but otherwise, not terribly slow) connection. I had to remote desktop to a CONUS computer and use a browser there in order for it to work...
There is a spot near me near a local college that is a worthless dead zone for data.
The signal is terrible, but it’s there. You can talk on the phone or send texts.
Surfing is horrible. At times you get great speeds. Two seconds later it feels like slow dial up. Really that’s what it feels like most of the time, any kind of speed is the anomaly.
As said in other comments, very few apps actually handle this well. They seem to expect that you either have a good connection or nothing.
It’s been like that for a decade plus. I assume it’s just overloaded and will never be fixed.
> (In spite of what HN believes, there are plenty of places in America with 3G or even zero cell service.)
0 of course, but wasn't 3G all shut down in the US in 2022 to open up the airspace?
0 of course, but wasn't 3G all shut down in the US in 2022 to open up the airspace?
One of those HN myths that comes from only being willing to Google (or ChatGPT) information, rather than encountering it in the real world.
3G still exists in rural and remote areas that no major carrier wants to serve, at least as of April, 2025 — the last time I did a round of real-world web testing. Next round is in September. Maybe with 5G in the cities, some hand-me-down 4G equipment has made it to the places where I test.
That's weird, because it's directly contradicting that the carriers themselves say they have decommissioned it.
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/plan-ahead-phase-out-3g...
I don't believe there is a contradiction.
The FCC page you linked is talking about major carriers decommissioning 3G.
The grandparent comment is talking about rural/remote areas that no major carrier served in the first place.
I guess what I am getting from this thread is, there is 3G service out there in the wild. However, in locations where 4G and 5G is available, 3G has been phased out
This doesn’t jibe with my experience trying to make phone calls on rural highways, where it seems there is no signal whatsoever more often than not.
I suppose this could be because ATT-Verizon-T-Mobile used to have 2G in that area (which was discontinued — 900Mhz analog voice band, also decommissioned) has moved on and left swathes of the US without signal, whereas, certain areas (commenter omits an example) never were served by major telecoms and have “evolved” their tech more slowly, so 3G is not decommissioned in those places. In that sense yes there is no contradiction. It still feels like we’ve gone backwards since there are places I used to be able to make a phone call that are now considered remote area with satellite SOS being you’re only way to reach someone
The big-3 have nationwide coverage (well, at least 2 of them).
But even beside that, AFAICT USCellular shut down 3G in January 2024, Appalachian Wireless in Dec 2022, Cellcom in Dec 2023, and C Spire sometime in 2022.
I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.
That's weird, because it's directly contradicting that the carriers themselves say they have decommissioned it. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/plan-ahead-phase-out-3g...
Thank you for proving my point, that people on HN falsely think they know more than others because they can Google a link, even though what's happening on the ground is entirely different.
Reality ≠ policy papers, press releases, or web links.
Or maybe you're incorrect? 3G is a technology and not a speed. Not sure why you believe your web traffic sampling is accurately identifying 3G.
I used to have an extremely cheap phone plan that had 500MB data, then 64kbps for the rest of the month.
You'd be surprised how far you can get with that. IRC works just fine (as long as you use Quassel w/ Quasseldroid), HN works well, so does reddit (via redreader). RSS readers and wikipedia work as well, and for general web browsing you can set up a readability proxy (basically Firefox' Reader Mode, but server-side). And of course email works really well, too.
Been there, done that, and all without the benefit of a home Internet connection. I also created a couple of scripts that I could run on my desktop computer to install new software or update my operating system. After running the scripts on my computer, I would wander over to the library with nothing more than my phone to download the packages along with grabbing some videos to watch offline.
The issue isn't really living with 500 MB/month of data. For most people, it will simply be knowing that you can do that. The next issue they will face is having the technical ability to actually do so. Then, once you've done all of that, the question will remain: will they be interested in the stripped down Internet. A lot of us who frequent HN may be since the results will still reflect our interests. There are people on IRC who we would want to talk to. There is a slant towards tech sites with RSS. And so on. That isn't going to be reflected in sites targeted at a general audience.
Sure, me and you and everyone here can open a shell connection and do everything with text and it'll work great on 64kbps.
Some of these guys have been locked up for 40 years straight. They're not doing all that extra stuff. They want to go on Indeed or Monster or YouTube. One job site I had to load on my desktop to find out why it wasn't working for them, only to discover the pages had a 250MB payload of random crap downloading, including videos.
The COTS solution for some web browsing is Opera Mini, which may still work? It also uses a proxy to prerender and compress websites, and worked ok at 2G speeds last I used it. It used to work well as a java applet and made the wider internet functional on feature phones. Very solid software.
But as a practical matter, what people rely on phones for are services that are app-based. Good luck completing a Venmo transaction or any amount of banking.
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.
Actually, this is based on my personal experience. I don't use a smartphone for internet. Many of the places where I've tried it, the "free wifi" doesn't work. Maybe the wifi is there, but the uplink is 2G speed, or it has a web sign-in that doesn't work any more. Or maybe an employee accidentally unplugged the router. Days/weeks ago. And "no one complained about it".
I've traveled Greyhound and Amtrak recently. They both advertise free wifi, but it's quite clear they no longer prioritize keeping it working.
Libraries are (probably/hopefully) an exception. But, seeing as Starbucks has been wanting to discourage people from hanging out in recent months, I wouldn't count on Starbucks wifi being reliable.
I was gonna say - the public library wifi is up to this task.
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 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?
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
> finding a library that's somehow still funded
Libraries just got an increase in funding in the US in the 2026 appropriations bills.
> 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
No-one's arbitrarily denying things. It's about what should and shouldn't be given as free things that other people work to pay for.
Libraries haven't gotten much since 2009 except for huge costs for digital licensing.
Ebook publishers are scamming the libraries. I shit you not, but over something like 4 years an ebook can be 10x the cost.
It's just such a crazy idea to lend ebooks.
"It's UNFAIR!" is the anthem of whiny children. If these people would benefit from access to Youtube, and we can provide it to them trivially, then by all means, let them have it. If it upsets you when people are given things for free, that's really a "you problem."
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.
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.
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.
> I've worked with a lot of people at the bottom end of society in the USA.
In adtech?
this is why Firefox with uBO is basically a requirement to browse mobile internet.
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."
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 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.
Wow, I had no idea.
The shitty thing is that serving the under-served is almost by definition (and perhaps by design) not lucrative so such folks continue to go under-served.
As we scale our products we think a lot about p99 and ensure we have all the 9s of uptime but even then we ignore the small percentage of folks who can't even begin to load our sites.
Thanks for sharing and for your service, sir/madam!
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.
That’s a low bar. Like crypto mining for the power company or throwing extra food out at the end of the day is revenue for the trash pickup company!
Agreed, this is almost a textbook example of the Parable of the Broken Window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
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
Agreed, my data plan don't approve these kind of pages.
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.
I’ve always wondered about this, does it stop downloading the video when it stops playing?
My guess is no.
This is incorrect. The setting does not apply to Safari. It's for App Store, for example.
Now tested - you’re right
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.
A reader who hits their mobile data cap after thirty minutes on your site will not be viewing any more of your ads for the next month. But if businesses were capable of thinking more than exactly one step ahead for any action they take, the tech industry wouldn't be such a shithole in the first place, of course.
I don't think what these websites are doing is "good", but I can't see them stopping any time soon.
I imagine people remember what site they were on when the data usage warnings came up, and they don't come back.
The question I guess is really if PC Gamer earns more by sending 100 mb / minute and chasing some eyeballs away faster, than by using a reasonable amount of data and losing eyeballs at the normal rate of attrition for written word outlets.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mind maze!
Encarta
You can still subscribe to the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
It's one way of avoiding AI garbage.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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".
> 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 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.
This drives me nuts. It's been going on for years that a simple "if this, do that" deal is encoded in an overly elaborate 10 minute long YouTube video where at least 9 minutes of it is filler. You know, when you start skimming the comments to see if anyone bothered with summarizing it.
AI amplifies the problem by making it easier to produce filler, but the problem is whatever metrics are behind the monetization. You need users to "engage" with your content for at least x amount of time to earn y amount of money, while instead the earnings should be relative to and directly derived from how useful the content is to how many users.
> 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
How is "them being livid" is gonna help revenue?
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.
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…
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.
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.
As if the so called journos are any better with the absolute garbage they write for that site.
Readers don't care. Customers don't care about the internal details of the company.
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.
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'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
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.
*without
Yes, I just can't imagine why would one browser the internet without adblock.
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.
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
yeah I got a lifetime license for Adguard (no affiliation) & been using that for three years now - it's been great.
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)
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.
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/
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
37 millibar? That's quite the bird's eye view.
Even more embarassing is that the article adds really nothing to whatever was written before about rss. Probably gobbled up by AI
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.
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'm hoping/dreaming it would be browser-standard, as a protocol. Kagi would be one of the reputation providers in that scheme.
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.
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 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.
You don't need RSS; you need AdBlock.
Try next filters:
Wipr 2 ad blocker for Safari reduced the transfer size of PC World article to 3,5 MB.
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.
Lighthouse can sometimes find RSS feeds for pages that don’t show an RSS button on the page:
https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder
I just don't pay for sites that don't offer full-text RSS (or email newsletters, for some sites) for subscribers.
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 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
Maybe not considered a solution, but: print.
Reader mode + ad blocker
Further: configure reader mode as the default for the sites you’re most commonly linked to.
> 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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
+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.
- 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 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...
Looking at the title, I was confused why a recommendation of some random PC gamer is interesting. Capitalization is important.
Trying to use the internet without an adblocker is honestly a tragic and harrowing experience.
The modern Web is truly unusable without an aggressive DNS filter and/or uBlock.
That's outrageous—advertisements have really gone too far.
It's 3.60 MB with NoScript enabled.
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.
in warhammer40k surfing without adblocker would be herasy
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
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".
How much would that be costing them? Thats a lot of data to serve for no reason.
Being alerted to, and preventing this, should be a built-in feature of the browser.
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.
I’m honestly amazed they tried that. It’s been so long, it felt like a play to cache in on the name but I feel like a huge chunk of people don’t really remember it or weren’t even around for it.
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...
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 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.
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.
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!