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

stuartbreckenridge.net

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

#211

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

smelendez wrote: post #104
Aurornis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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

#212

Post by hedora »

reaperducer wrote: post #93
Aurornis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 se…

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.

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

#213

Post by plasticbugs »

neya wrote: post #209
__natty__ wrote: post #147

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…

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

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

#214

Post by abustamam »

what wrote: post #182
abustamam wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

#215

Post by hedora »

promiseofbeans wrote: post #207
qingcharles wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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

#216

Post by bryanhogan »

goldenarm wrote: post #7

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

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.

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

#217

Post by hedora »

thevinter wrote: post #79
qingcharles wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with a lot of people at the bottom end of society in the USA. They are given government provided phones they can use so they have access to Google Maps, email, job search apps etc. These phones come with 3GB of regular data per month. After that they drop down to 2G speed, but not in a way that will allow anything to actually load. Three days into the month these phones are just ewaste.

I lived for months with a 4GB roaming plan. Given, I was not using it at home since I had a wifi connection, but I rarely came close to using all my data unless I was watching YT videos when traveling or something. I share your sentiment and I agree we should be more mindful of people with metered/slow connections, but the last statement feels blown out of proportion.

I used to be able to get away with this by downloading music, podcasts and maps at home.

During the iOS 26 upgrade cycle, iOS deleted all my third-party map apps and then expired the locally downloaded apple maps. My phone also somehow lost my downloaded podcasts + music a few times, but, unlike losing three offline map applications, that didn't strand me in the middle of the woods with no cell coverage and no maps.

I agree that 4GB (or even 1GB) goes very far with a working phone OS though.

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

#218

Post by never_inline »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #29

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.

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.

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

#220

Post by hedora »

Aurornis wrote: post #76
userbinator wrote: post #48

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.

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.

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