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.
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.
What is your screen resolution ? I have the same setup but got different results.
Initial load, after closing cookie banner and another one, was about 500KiB (200KiB transferred). After scrolling to the bottom I got 1.7MiB/1.0MiB transferred.
I guess you're using a retina-like display ? (I got there results with a 1080p screen)
37MB sounds like pure mismanagement though beyond understandable desperation. Surely a competent consultant could reduce that number with zero negative impact?
Just gotta pay everyone who's not an asset owner, who actually worked for their money. So much dysfunction is just a matter of the owner class cornering wage negotiations and forcing people to make due with way less pay than their labor is actually worth. People don't pay for news because they can't afford to. There's an alternate universe where everyone makes the extra 20-30 bucks a month to afford a news subscription, and they pay it, and journalism happens in the interests of the people paying. Back in ours, journalism still happens in the interests of the people paying: the owners and advertisers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
It seems the author’s browser is severely misconfigured. The PC Gamer website works fine for me. I can read the contents of the article he linked to with no issues or distractions and it loads instantly.
The author's complaint(s) stem from the ads that "just keeps downloading" which in approximately five minutes downloaded "almost half a gigabyte" worth of information.
This is a prime example of why many people use adblockers, it's not just to make the majority of the web actually usable, but it prevents excessive data transfers that we never asked for. For what it's worth, the same article is just a hair over 8MB when ads are blocked and a hair over 9MB when you scroll down (loading the thumbnails for the other articles).
8 MB for an article about setting up an RSS reader is still ridiculous. Should be <1MB, the text itself is probably a few K, so all the rest is graphics and bullshit JS bundles.
Disabling Privacy Badger, reloading the site and scrolling around a bit, I can comfortably stay that the author is wrong, the site is much larger. Within two minutes the site has now transfered 50MB (of 75MB) according to Firefox, but it does indeed keep going, constantly loading more and more stuff in the background.
I left that page open in Firefox on macOS (no ad blockers) and after five minutes the network devtools panel showed me it had hit 200MB transferred, 250MB total from over 2,300 requests.
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.
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.
The person who wrote the article and the people in charge of the site are different.
Sure, but it’s a great example of the reason RSS readers are so great. No matter how much you enjoy the work of particular authors - their editorial oversight might make it too miserable to enjoy.
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)
Yet with RSS you can read between 300 and 1800 articles, depending on the feed type.
>In Firefox + Ublock Origin
This is the way, just gotta pay (journos)
37MB sounds like pure mismanagement though beyond understandable desperation. Surely a competent consultant could reduce that number with zero negative impact?
Just gotta pay everyone who's not an asset owner, who actually worked for their money. So much dysfunction is just a matter of the owner class cornering wage negotiations and forcing people to make due with way less pay than their labor is actually worth. People don't pay for news because they can't afford to. There's an alternate universe where everyone makes the extra 20-30 bucks a month to afford a news subscription, and they pay it, and journalism happens in the interests of the people paying. Back in ours, journalism still happens in the interests of the people paying: the owners and advertisers.
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
Lighthouse can sometimes find RSS feeds for pages that don’t show an RSS button on the page:
https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder
Maybe not considered a solution, but: print.
I use the iOS app of https://brutalist.report for this these days.
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.
Reader mode + ad blocker
Further: configure reader mode as the default for the sites you’re most commonly linked to.
There are readers with a 'full text mode' which will fetch the website and display it in something like Mozilla's Readability view. It does not always work, especially if the page is paywalled but it works for most sites.
Most quality journals are paywalled nowadays, I'm considering to scrape using my cookie, or maybe use archive.is..
Pay for the web or print edition?
Journalists need to eat as well as you do.
The more people aren't supporting journalists weather in Substack or Reuters, the more articles that will be behind a paywall.
It's such a shame as well since AI is also constantly bypassing and scraping RSS for business and commercial purposes, violating licenses.
> no paid media provides full articles in RSS anymore
Substack does and it's first class. Patreon does a decent job.
Not an RSS solution, also relies on US-based third parties.
this just reminds me of...
- watching "normal" cable tv
- listening to "normal" fm radio
- shopping on amazon (sponsored... everything)
This is why I pay to get rid of ads in things I like. Podcasts and TV are the big ones.
I just started watching season 2 of Jury Duty on Amazon. I had deleted the app when they announced that as a paying subscriber I would be getting ads.
Oh my God the ads are so horrible. So much worse than I remember.
Also, extra kudos to Amazon for nearly doubling the price of removing the ads the week before the show came out. How nice of them.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
it's relatively easy for an ai to write such an article now, just open all websites and gather metrics while crawling...
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
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.
It seems the author’s browser is severely misconfigured. The PC Gamer website works fine for me. I can read the contents of the article he linked to with no issues or distractions and it loads instantly.
The author's complaint(s) stem from the ads that "just keeps downloading" which in approximately five minutes downloaded "almost half a gigabyte" worth of information.
This is a prime example of why many people use adblockers, it's not just to make the majority of the web actually usable, but it prevents excessive data transfers that we never asked for. For what it's worth, the same article is just a hair over 8MB when ads are blocked and a hair over 9MB when you scroll down (loading the thumbnails for the other articles).
8 MB for an article about setting up an RSS reader is still ridiculous. Should be <1MB, the text itself is probably a few K, so all the rest is graphics and bullshit JS bundles.
"misconfigured" as in no adblocker? ;-)
Disabling Privacy Badger, reloading the site and scrolling around a bit, I can comfortably stay that the author is wrong, the site is much larger. Within two minutes the site has now transfered 50MB (of 75MB) according to Firefox, but it does indeed keep going, constantly loading more and more stuff in the background.
I left that page open in Firefox on macOS (no ad blockers) and after five minutes the network devtools panel showed me it had hit 200MB transferred, 250MB total from over 2,300 requests.
Sounds like the author is running the same browser configuration as the vast majority of internet users.
While I use ad-blockers and the like, I know I’m far from the norm.
Post a network recording of that page loading from a code start on your machine. I’ll believe chrome devtools.
(Note that if OP considers to do this, they probably want to do this in a private tab, as to not leak potential sensitive cross-site cookies)
5 min in, after only scrolling to the bottom of the article:
4300 requests, 238 MB downloaded
With Firefox and all extensions disabled