Only half? The number of pages I load that have a video playing in them would make me think it's way, way higher than that.
Ads chew through half of mobile data
61–70 of 256 posts
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#62It's immoral that you cannot turn off videos in a browser and/or that this isn't the default option on phones.
I use Stopthemadness to stop video autoplay
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#63Be sure to read my follow up article, "How ads are funding the services you request the other half of your mobile data from, so you can use them without paying except with some mobile data and some pixels on your screen."
I would love to have a way to pay for most websites but experience shows that the genius MBAs get your subscription fee and then start tacking on ads and tracking anyway. So fuck them. ad blockers, proxies, pihole, vpns, whatever you have to do.
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#64(Video portals aside) The text you want to read: a few kilobytes. The (oeconomical, an economical) cost of the ads surrounding it: several dozen to a hundred megabytes. You cannot convince me that this _isn't_ unsustainable quackery that got out of hands really, really bad.
html email was the start of a slippery slope. i remember complaining about data consumption of non-text email BITD. that was when the state of the art for email servers was to dedup list email so that the server would save only one copy and just reference it for all recipients.
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#65I assume the worst offender in this is youtube. It’s awful because ads ALWAYS load immediately, but the actual media i want to watch always lags or is buffering.
When i’m on mobile data advertisements are always super clear and in super high resolution, but i often get pushed low-res versions of the media.
I really hope some better company comes and dismantles YouTube as a business.
Edit: i’m using plain YouTube on plain iOS, so it’s all on google/YouTube.
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#66Be sure to read my follow up article, "How ads are funding the services you request the other half of your mobile data from, so you can use them without paying except with some mobile data and some pixels on your screen."
Paying with money is better.
People's revealed preferences are very clear, however much they deny it.
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saving the article text locally and gzipping it (which lacks html tags, but should be approximately right), it's ~1.5 kB. So 2kB for the article and say 5kB for a cacheable site-wide template is what things "ought" to be. My 1GB mobile data plan should be enough to read at least 10s of thousands of pages in a month. Instead at 60MB, I could read... 16. Naturally I never use mobile data, and my only real use for a pho…
I’m due for a new phone and I’m strongly considering going to a dumb phone with a tablet around the house for browsing. I can carry a Kindle or something to kill time waiting for a train.
I'd do that but a smartphone is unfortunately a great pocket camera. The sweet spot for me would be something like a modern version of the Nokia N95 — great camera, unrestricted OS that lets me write apps in Python or whatever, and terrible web browsing experience.
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#68A solution: AdGuardHome and WireGuard running at home. WireGuard connects on-demand when I leave home. I choose to run it at home because there are cases where services and/or sites block datacenter IPs, and I have complete control over what and how I block, no proxying through any blocking service.
A solution for you and some other tech savvy individuals; not a great solution for the rest of my family. Plus, it ignores the systemic problem in exchange for personal one-off bandaids.
A one-off solution like this is really the only type of solution we have in the face of a massive ad tech industry that largely piggybacks on top of, and inserts itself into, foundational network and web protocols.
Fixing the problem itself would likely require legislation and regulation to get ad tech companies (or the companies that use the ad tech) to pay attention to the data use.
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#69Be sure to read my follow up article, "How ads are funding the services you request the other half of your mobile data from, so you can use them without paying except with some mobile data and some pixels on your screen."
I would love to have a way to pay for most websites but experience shows that the genius MBAs get your subscription fee and then start tacking on ads and tracking anyway. So fuck them. ad blockers, proxies, pihole, vpns, whatever you have to do.
Google gave people that but ~nobody used it (it was called Google Contributor). Many similar stories over the years. People overwhelmingly choose ad-supported services over paid ones. Even when "MBAs" don't add extra ads on top or whatever other objection you have, it's all been tried before and failed every time.
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#70A lot of web pages only work for me on my iPhone if I use reader mode. Otherwise, the page keeps resetting over and over again. Firefox, but I assume Safari is probably the same, since Apple mandates they all be based on WebKit.
You can try adguard on iOS. It’s an app that you buy as an extension for safari but the block lists are very good and you can enable DoH systemwide as well.
As someone who switched from Iphone to Android, Adguard is very poor compared to uBlock, and it was in fact one major reason (of several) why I switched. But now that Google is killing adblockers, I might just stop browsing the internet entirely.