Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

stuartbreckenridge.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 417 posts

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

#241

Post by johnwalkr »

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.

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

#242

Post by jojobas »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #232
jojobas wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#243

Post by vasco »

johnwalkr wrote: post #241

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…

> 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.

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

#244

Post by coryrc »

filoleg wrote: post #233
coryrc wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#245

Post by gertop »

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.

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.

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

#246

Post by parineum »

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 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.

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

#247

Post by codebje »

encom wrote: post #230
hackpelican wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#248

Post by thaumasiotes »

strken wrote: post #225
qingcharles wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 loa…

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.

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

#249

Post by OptionX »

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…

>"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.

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

#250

Post by pineaux »

OptionX wrote: post #249
neya wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>"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.
Post reply on HN