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
Substack does and it's first class. Patreon does a decent job.
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 wonder how this works on mobile data though which is significantlym more expensive than home network data.
> 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.
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.
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.
- watching "normal" cable tv
- listening to "normal" fm radio
- shopping on amazon (sponsored... everything)
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 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.
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.
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)
Scrolling to the bottom of the page added 3MB of images and then stopped loading.
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?
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)
Also, thank you to the six people who download those 500MB to keep the site alive for the rest of us.
nslsm•1h ago
userbinator•1h ago
adampunk•1h ago
Koffiepoeder•1h ago
jonathanlydall•1h ago
While I use ad-blockers and the like, I know I’m far from the norm.
3842056935870•1h ago
4300 requests, 238 MB downloaded
With Firefox and all extensions disabled
FractalParadigm•1h ago
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).
Sardtok•1h ago
mrweasel•1h ago
simonw•1h ago