> 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.

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 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.

The obvious easy fix is to give them unlimited data. If the intent is to give them internet, they should give them internet that functions for the modern web.

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 routers will continue routing and the switches will continue switching whether you download 5GBs or 5TBs.

One more way to understand how much of a scam mobile data caps are, is that the same ISP will sell you unlimited fiber plans even though essentially your traffic goes through the same backbone.

Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers, but they don’t need to be as low as they are today.

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.

Data caps make congestion worse, because you are more likely to restrict where you use data and people are predictable. You'll no longer use bits everywhere because you care less, you'll use it where everyone else does.

In the long run, all costs are variable. Phone companies lack the bandwidth to provide all their customers unlimited data all the time. Most of them can’t even provide full speeds to their existing customers at peak times. If they gave everyone unlimited data they’d have to get more bandwidth, and they’d pass on every penny of the cost.

Just wait 15 years when the middle class has been struggling with easily accessible gambling and it can't be explained as problem of character. There will be laws passed and people prosecuted or successfully sued.

Those folks that did fall to it, then became (often) lower class while failing to it.

The thing to realize, is that the upper classes ‘eat their own’ just like any other. It’s why Trump is as frantic as he is, he knows what will happen when he stops being ‘useful’/necessary.

But even if that wasn't a thing - the way it's ruined watching sports now, with the constant odds flashing, etc, I'd ban it JUST for that, on top of all the detrimental effects on society.

I don't remember "I can't throw money away on this football play" being a massive society wide problem that needed fixing in 2010, pretty sure everyone could bet with their friends already.

They can also just go to the local library or Starbucks for the WiFi if they need more.

You can barely even use FB messenger (you need to get messenger-lite).

I only know this cuz tmobile would give you free 2g all over europe. it was JUST BARELY helpful. mostly just sms and email.

google maps was unusable etc. This only got worse over the years.

They now give you free 3G and it's bearable. 2G is insanely slow in the 2020+ world.

2G ~= 5 KB/s. That means 40 seconds just to download a properly optimized react bundle.

5MB site? 16+ minutes.

Note that many European countries have already got rid of their 3G networks completely [0]. So it's either "you have 4G/5G" or "the internet is pretty much unusable", nothing in between.

As someone living in a European country with no 3G network, my experience with mobile data is that when my phone fails to find a 4G signal and switches to 2G (pretty much only happens in remote areas, thankfully), I can as well send my packets using a pigeon carrier, they're going to arrive to the destination sooner.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G#Phase-out

My experience with 2G speeds is:

1. Open job application site

2. Upload resume pdf

3. Upload required picture of ID

4. Server's nginx config has a hard-coded timeout after 1 minute. Connection error

5. Try to upload again

6. Connection error

A huge number of pieces of the web have hardcoded timeouts and limits designed to stop slowloris style attacks, and if your connection is slow enough, those will prevent you from ever being able to complete some tasks.

I've paid for 2GB/mo for years now. I think I ran out once.

Cell phone systems already have some tiering built in, at least based on the fine print I've read about my plans. Once I run out of "official data" I fall back to low-priority usage, but the cell system is generally so well-provisioned nowadays that I hardly notice. In 2026, one must take explicit action to force people back to 2G. Nothing would stop these plans from, say, simply always being "low priority usage" but at full speed, and for the most part this would satisfy everyone.

This sort of clause reeks of "it was written into a contract 15 years ago and nobody has even so much as thought about it since then" rather than some sort of choice.

If you mean why I don't pay for the publicly provided wifi: well, I would. And all of us. Public services are funded by taxpayer dollars. I would happily accept public wifi for that

So you're stuck in a loop of not being able to use the web because the websites keep downloading stuff you don't need.

I guess you could configure it not to do that, or write your own imap client with better behavior -- on your 2G smartphone.

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 service. (In spite of what HN believes, there are plenty of places in America with 3G or even zero cell service.)

2G speeds will not work. The device or one of the essential thousands of processes in it will time out because they were designed by tech bubble tech bros who never use their apps in the real world.

0 of course, but wasn't 3G all shut down in the US in 2022 to open up the airspace?

One of those HN myths that comes from only being willing to Google (or ChatGPT) information, rather than encountering it in the real world.

3G still exists in rural and remote areas that no major carrier wants to serve, at least as of April, 2025 — the last time I did a round of real-world web testing. Next round is in September. Maybe with 5G in the cities, some hand-me-down 4G equipment has made it to the places where I test.

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/plan-ahead-phase-out-3g...

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.

This doesn’t jibe with my experience trying to make phone calls on rural highways, where it seems there is no signal whatsoever more often than not.

I suppose this could be because ATT-Verizon-T-Mobile used to have 2G in that area (which was discontinued — 900Mhz analog voice band, also decommissioned) has moved on and left swathes of the US without signal, whereas, certain areas (commenter omits an example) never were served by major telecoms and have “evolved” their tech more slowly, so 3G is not decommissioned in those places. In that sense yes there is no contradiction. It still feels like we’ve gone backwards since there are places I used to be able to make a phone call that are now considered remote area with satellite SOS being you’re only way to reach someone

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.

I gotchu, but I wanna be clear that it is all just fringe/regional operators (which is what the claim was originally about anyway, not about major telcos).

I found a couple with user reports claiming 3G support still being active in random pockets of Wyoming/Colorado/etc. (but no confirmation on the official website), and one with confirmation on the official website.

The one with the official confirmation is Union Wireless[0], with UMTS being a stand-in for 3G (color-coded in grey on their coverage map; mostly southern Wyoming plus parts of Colorado, Utah, and Idaho).

I agree with your overall point though. Functionally, 3G is dead in the US. But factually, there are a few holdout fringe remote areas that still have it.

0. https://www.unionwireless.com/wireless-coverage

Thank you for proving my point, that people on HN falsely think they know more than others because they can Google a link, even though what's happening on the ground is entirely different.

Reality ≠ policy papers, press releases, or web links.

You'd be surprised how far you can get with that. IRC works just fine (as long as you use Quassel w/ Quasseldroid), HN works well, so does reddit (via redreader). RSS readers and wikipedia work as well, and for general web browsing you can set up a readability proxy (basically Firefox' Reader Mode, but server-side). And of course email works really well, too.

The issue isn't really living with 500 MB/month of data. For most people, it will simply be knowing that you can do that. The next issue they will face is having the technical ability to actually do so. Then, once you've done all of that, the question will remain: will they be interested in the stripped down Internet. A lot of us who frequent HN may be since the results will still reflect our interests. There are people on IRC who we would want to talk to. There is a slant towards tech sites with RSS. And so on. That isn't going to be reflected in sites targeted at a general audience.

But as a practical matter, what people rely on phones for are services that are app-based. Good luck completing a Venmo transaction or any amount of banking.

I just tried to look for this and all links I'm seeing just forward to the main Opera page

Some of these guys have been locked up for 40 years straight. They're not doing all that extra stuff. They want to go on Indeed or Monster or YouTube. One job site I had to load on my desktop to find out why it wasn't working for them, only to discover the pages had a 250MB payload of random crap downloading, including videos.

The signal is terrible, but it’s there. You can talk on the phone or send texts.

Surfing is horrible. At times you get great speeds. Two seconds later it feels like slow dial up. Really that’s what it feels like most of the time, any kind of speed is the anomaly.

As said in other comments, very few apps actually handle this well. They seem to expect that you either have a good connection or nothing.

It’s been like that for a decade plus. I assume it’s just overloaded and will never be fixed.

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 loads some of it it takes so long that the busses have gone past by the time they've tried to figure out what direction they need to go.

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.

At that point, why would you use Google Maps at all? Osmand will do the same thing, and requires no connection.

If you assume that mapping services on a low-to-no bandwidth connection are important to them, they'll hear about it through word of mouth. Anything that solves a real problem will spread that way.

Contrapositively, we can conclude that mapping isn't much of a problem for these people.

The other problem with any map tile downloading is that it eats up their entire 3GB of transfer and their phone is dead before they even start. Catch-22.

My experience trying to get it to find a route to work just now involved finding my street name but not being able to enter my address, not being able to enter my workplace's exact address either, getting told to take an express train to a stop that I know it never stops at during peak hour, and searching in vain for a way to change the trip time. I bet it also can't handle delays, cancellations, or bus replacements.

Maybe it works better in your city? I notice you wrote "we can conclude that mapping isn't much of a problem for these people", but you could use the same evidence to conclude Osmand isn't much of a solution for their problem.

(I will note that I use it for hiking and it's very good for that, as it is for cycling.)

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.

"I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? 10 dollars?"

2G is really from a different age. Does anyone remember WAP and i-mode? I was certainly not able to afford data back then, but that is what all the business’y types were raving about.

2G EDGE was 384 kbit/s (48 kB/s) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G). That means 21 seconds to download a 1 MB page.

I just loaded the careers page at my employer, and the page weighed in at 3.6 MB, so you're talking 75 seconds.

In reality this is like 16kb with speeds similar to 56k modem. No modern JS website works. Ssh, irc works and thats about it. Modern stuff like certificates also slows it down.

I'm talking here about real life - not some emulated 2G in your browser.

I can tell you don’t actually have to use it because if you did you’d know your statement isn’t accurate.

I've traveled Greyhound and Amtrak recently. They both advertise free wifi, but it's quite clear they no longer prioritize keeping it working.

Libraries are (probably/hopefully) an exception. But, seeing as Starbucks has been wanting to discourage people from hanging out in recent months, I wouldn't count on Starbucks wifi being reliable.

The issue is that the wifi isn't available where they need it. If I send them to the SSA building to get some federal docs, it's in a dead zone. It might be in the middle of Chicago but there isn't any free wifi for a mile in any direction from there. How do they pull up Google Maps to get home? And it's not always obvious how to get the free wifi as it doesn't just let you connect, you had to go through a multi-step process of signing in and accepting T&Cs these days. Which the phone doesn't always want to do.

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.

if they have a better deal for new users: sign up for a new account under someone else in your household, and cancel your old account after you get your new account hardware setup and working.

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 had data turned off most of the time. At home and in the office I had WiFi. Loaded the map before I left home.

Most other places I was too busy doing whatever I was doing to use a phone. Since upgrading, I guess I can look products up in stores now. That's about it.

What you cannot do, contrary to what someone posted in this thread, is get by on 2G. So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure in this case.

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.

And poor people often share one phone for an entire family, or even one phone among two or three neighboring households. These are a lot of the customers I serve, and it has a lot of unique challenges around accounts, privacy, and yes data use.

HN has no idea was poverty looks like.

The shitty thing is that serving the under-served is almost by definition (and perhaps by design) not lucrative so such folks continue to go under-served.

As we scale our products we think a lot about p99 and ensure we have all the 9s of uptime but even then we ignore the small percentage of folks who can't even begin to load our sites.

Thanks for sharing and for your service, sir/madam!

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 home it’s fine. Just using data on the go is a non-starter for many

Presumably, that's fast now, right? I'm surprised people don't just lean heavily on it instead of the (mismanaged?) cell network.

In adtech?

Sure part of "software fills space like a gas" can be explained by "got to go fast to stay ahead on the market", but at some point it’s blatant negligence of frugality where it’s providing overall economical benefits.

Recently tried to alter a phone plan on EE’s website, something that should have involved a few clicks. It was slow (literal seconds to open a page) and clunky. The Javascript console was bleeding error messages, and it looked like they’d used every Javascript framework under the sun. And after all that it just gave me an error message saying that the transaction could not be processed.

Gave up and texted (old school SMS) their help line. With a few text messages I was able to change plans. Probably used under 500 bytes to accomplish what the bloated and broken website couldn’t.

Despite years of being too lazy/anxious to figure out phone number portability, I ultimately ended up switching carriers from Simple to Mint because it was just too annoying.

There's dozens of things to optimize for in software development, with resource usage being only a few of them (as CPU, memory, and network are different targets). Who are you to decide which are the most important? And if you think that you can do a better job at picking the right trades while keeping companies in business, then you would be able to make a lot of money doing so.

But you won't. The actual reason why companies (and even personal and open-source software projects) make these "wasteful" design decisions is because normal users have clearly indicated their priorities. The majority of people would rather trade some performance for a "modern" web design, and have heavy videos rather than lightweight text to give a product overview, and want that one particular feature that adds cat ears to their profile photo and if the competition has it they'll switch.

Do I think these priorities are wrong and stupid? Absolutely. I hate bloated web pages and slow applications. But empirically, with billions of dollars of evidence, these are decisions driven by users' and customers' priorities.

Look at sites built for professionals, like Digikey and McMaster-Carr - far better designed and more performant, because they cater to customers that care about those things.

It's extremely obvious what users prioritize. And if you think that "they don't know what's best for them, but I do" - what makes you any better than a member of the economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?

That’s precisely the elephant in the room. Money is a distortion and filtering lense that makes obvious things look inexistent until the wall it renders invisible is hit — at high the highest speed it could reach before that.

Reality is extremely poorly summarized within the frame of a single scalar value.

>And if you think that "they don't know what's best for them, but I do" - what makes you any better than a member of the economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?

First of all, there no necessity to go into a you/I or them/us mindset. Also it’s not because some group don’t know what’s best for themselves that any other group will know better — whatever the label given the this other group: "I" or "too-big-to-fail Inc.".

This whole message also seem to assume some kind of full rationalization based on user priorities. But user base to a large extent takes what’s the most obviously thrown at their face. They sometime can tweak their applications if it does give some options to do so, or switch to some alternative if there are not trapped in a defacto oligopoly.

Do people want LLMs thrown at their face at every single corner of their digital interactions? Or is the the "throw it at every single surface indiscriminately and see what stick" driven by the hope that something will stick and make the capital venture lottery produce a few winner take it all?

No, money is the most accurate way of measuring value to people that has ever been invented. It quite literally is the least distorted lens you can possibly get. Every single other metric is worse. Aren't you aware of the well-known scientific truism that it's impossible to directly perceive reality, and that all of the indirect methods that we have are imperfect? This is the economic corollary to that.

> Reality is extremely poorly summarized within the frame of a single scalar value.

Correct. Yet, every sane and reasonably well-educated person knows that money is the least bad single scalar value (that also happens to strongly correlate with businesses remaining solvent and individuals remaining off the streets) that can be used to measure value delivered to individuals, and that there's no alternative scalar value or combination of values that's anywhere close to as well agreed-upon as money.

Everything else in your comment is incoherent. "First of all, there no necessity to go into a you/I or them/us mindset." doesn't mean anything.

As they say "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it", which also have many other more flavors.[1]

>Aren't you aware of the well-known scientific truism that it's impossible to directly perceive reality, and that all of the indirect methods that we have are imperfect?

As human being, we can’t avoid to make errors, including in our representations, if that is what is meant here, then we have an agreement on that point. But as sure as there are no absolute total truth reachable in the frame of human existence, it’s impossible for a human to claim absolute ignorance in total honesty.

Money at best is a proxy for binding individuals into social classes. In a sense, sure it does measure some human values. Mostly values of dominating classes.

> Yet, every sane and reasonably well-educated person knows that money is the least bad single scalar value

Hello, here is an unreasonable poorly-educated person to which class disdain won’t bother them to the point they just keep quite.

> there's no alternative scalar value or combination of values that's anywhere close to as well agreed-upon as money.

There are of course many possible alternatives. Actually neoliberal capitalism is a very brief moment in human history, even LLMs run by capitalist companies will explain that to anyone interested to ask.[2] Sure money can also be used in different social models, but not all models using money try to inseminate in its social members that it’s the one and sole best indicator of human fulfillment.

>Everything else in your comment is incoherent.

Once again, an LLM can give some chip feedback on such a matter, at least at the analysis level that LLMs can operate on.[3]

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

[2] https://chat.mistral.ai/chat/5fc6465f-05fd-4a83-841f-60f9e5c...

[3] https://chat.mistral.ai/chat/e6fe5224-506d-40ac-857f-e14e56b...

This is a useless, irrelevant, and fallacious thought-terminating cliche that you're using as an attempt to disguise the fact that you have presented no alternative - because you know I'll tear it to shreds if you do. (an LLM comment doesn't count, because they lie and hallucinate, and it's not you responding)

> even LLMs run by capitalist companies will explain that to anyone interested to ask.[2]

You can't even be bothered to try to think for yourself. "psychoslave" is an extremely apt name for your account.

> Money at best is a proxy for binding individuals into social classes.

Oh, and there's the politics - you're not interested in debate, you're a propagandist. You're not arguing in good faith (if that wasn't clear enough from the LLM-generated responses, failure to make any sort of coherent argument, and not including a single actual alternative to money as a proxy for measuring value). If you respond, I'll do my best to debunk your arguments for future HN readers, but it's useless to try to convince you while your basic mindset is that you're shilling for a particular political point.

Once again, this kind of sentence show a total absence of will to go further than I/you mentality. A wider perspective is hard to achieve, if even possible, without putting the pretence of this/that personality. This is a path that seems as relevant as yelling at a computer when a software bug occurs. That might feel like a way to evacuate the frustration, but the computer won’t work better not matter what profanity is uttered (though it will never be bothered either, unlike fellow humans which have limited patience and have awareness of their own limited time to be alive).

>(an LLM comment doesn't count, because they lie and hallucinate, and it's not you responding)

LLM can certainly generate confabulations, but pretending they hallucinate or think is a lie. LLMs can also make totally sound output. Using a tool that can generate summary quickly doesn’t mean it voids the hand crafted answer that point to it.

It’s wise not taking LLMs output as a given regarding truth, but they certainly can be useful to point to considerations that can be falsified on one own preferred means.

>You can't even be bothered to try to think for yourself. "psychoslave" is an extremely apt name for your account.

Once again, this kind of attitude brings zero constructive contribution to the discussion. Everyone can be tired or have a bad day and push easily the "ad hominem" button. Hopefully that’s not an deeply engraved habit, and just taking some rest might be enough to step back and provide more positive prose in a near future.

>Oh, and there's the politics - you're not interested in debate, you're a propagandist. You're not arguing in good faith (if that wasn't clear enough from the LLM-generated responses, failure to make any sort of coherent argument, and not including a single actual alternative to money as a proxy for measuring value).

If anyone that disagrees with some premisses is disqualified of being a good faith debate participant, there is actually not much debate to hold, isn’t it?

> not including a single actual alternative to money as a proxy for measuring value

It makes manifest that this comment don’t take into account what was linked previously, so it’s better stop here, but for those interested in some other way to measure value and social systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Progress_Index

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Progress_Index

Yeah, you have nothing, and the absolute drivel in the rest of your comment reflects that. These values are categorically not accepted as a proxy for value in any educated country.

To my mind users are simply using what’s put in front of them. They lack the technical knowledge to know better things are possible and even if they did they don’t have any way to advocate for it. Over half of US users use an ad blocker:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/

That alone suggests to me that when given a choice users actually do care.

Through the platforms they choose to use. Coarse and inefficient and frustrating? Yes. Effective at demonstrating mass preferences and thereby imposing those preferences on platforms? Also yes.

> That alone suggests to me that when given a choice users actually do care.

Using an ad-blocker is obviously extremely different than what I'm describing here.

An ad-blocker is a composable feature that you can graft onto any particular market.

What I'm describing is a relative prioritization among different features, where one has to rank what they truly value, and sacrifice some of the lower-ranked things for the higher-ranked ones. That's categorically different than just being able to flip a switch and turn off ads and save bandwidth with negligible downside.

> Do you have an example of two competing services offering the same features, one bloated and one not, and users locked to the bloated one?

This is irrelevant - see above comment about relative prioritization. Features are one of the "dozens of things to optimize for in software development" that I mentioned above. I can point to many platforms where the bloated ones are winning - because they have the features that users want, and they value those more highly. That's my whole point.

You really think it's the users asking for bloated webpages? Reddit has been pushing their reddit redesign forever now. No users ever asked for it. There is a large community of users that insist on using the old.reddit interface, and reddit has been chipping away by slowly breaking more and more things (most recently, the mod page).

Compare that with hacker news or craig's list. They're still super light weight, fit for purpose, and I am forever thankful the webdevs (dang,etc) responsible for them did not succumb to the temptation to 'web 2.0/SPA' it.

It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks. See also, how nobody builds 'starter' homes anymore. There's a huge unmet market for it, but homebuilders find building mcMansions to be more profitable, so that's what gets built.

> It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks.

You clearly didn't read my comment before responding, because I very clearly made the point that it's not about users wanting worse performance, but a matter of relative priority. Suggest reading before responding.

> Reddit has been pushing their reddit redesign forever now. No users ever asked for it. There is a large community of users that insist on using the old.reddit interface, and reddit has been chipping away by slowly breaking more and more things (most recently, the mod page).

And yet, clearly enough people are getting enough value from the site that it's worth the bloat to them, otherwise Reddit would have reversed the redesign years ago. I also know multiple people who voluntarily use the redesign while being aware of the classic interface.

So, you're literally proving my point.

Users enduring yet another web 2.0 redesign does not go so far as to prove acceptance. I think every poll they've had on the redesign has been negative.

Regardless, I don't feel like continuing this discussion given your abrasive tone. Tell yourself you 'won' if it satisfies any urge to respond further.

You clearly did not, because nobody who actually read my comment and has functional reading comprehension and basic logic skills would have written these responses:

> You really think it's the users asking for bloated webpages?

> It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks.

And:

> and disagreed with it.

Disagreement is only relevant for matters of opinion. For matters of fact, like this one, there is no opinion - only facts and arguments. Can you not tell the difference between opinion and fact?

> Users enduring yet another web 2.0 redesign does not go so far as to prove acceptance.

OK, now you're just trolling, because I already addressed this point in both of the comments you've responded to.

> Tell yourself you 'won' if it satisfies any urge to respond further.

You've proven that you're either unable to read or unable to use basic logic, so it's not even that I've won - you've eliminated yourself. You haven't been able to make a single valid point - you've just misread, misunderstood, and mischaracterized my arguments, and then failed to make any coherent response whatsoever.

The customer.

(again, I'm not saying this is a good thing - read my parent comment again)

Are you saying using 1GB of data a day on a smartphone is normal for smartphone users? I have a 10GB plan not because I need it (looking at this year, 2GB would be more than sufficient) but because that’s about the lowest I can get nowadays.

Certainly if, as indicated, the intent is for these users to have a phone for essentials, not for watching YouTube or playing music, 3 GB, IMO, should be sufficient.

Maybe YouTube or listening to music aren't strictly essentials but they also don't seem like absurd luxuries that we should be arbitrarily denying to people in 2026 to save a few cents per user on what I assume is a set of bulk purchased SIMs.

Libraries just got an increase in funding in the US in the 2026 appropriations bills.

> Maybe YouTube or listening to music aren't strictly essentials but they also don't seem like absurd luxuries that we should be arbitrarily denying to people in 2026

No-one's arbitrarily denying things. It's about what should and shouldn't be given as free things that other people work to pay for.

Ebook publishers are scamming the libraries. I shit you not, but over something like 4 years an ebook can be 10x the cost.

My daughter also has a 3GB data plan but she knows to only use whatsapp when she isn't connected to a Wifi network and we configured it to not auto load the photos and videos when on mobile data.

If we didn't have ads, people would not only need less bandwidth, they'd buy less physical junk, and quite possibly be happier for it.

I really think the marketing people behind most websites just could not give a shit less about users. To them, they are faceless plebs to be manipulated and milked, not humans to be respected. It's quite disheartening.

Untested since I run my phone via Wireguard to my home network and block everything there.

My guess is no.

I recall some years back having corporate IT ask me why I was downloading terabytes off this weird website called "imgur" that they didn't know about. Realized I had a tab open with a stupid jackie chan mp4 a few seconds long on some background workspace, and that had just kept downloading over and over and over and over...

- watching "normal" cable tv

- listening to "normal" fm radio

- shopping on amazon (sponsored... everything)

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.

I completely cancelled Prime when they sent that email. To hit me with a monthly charge when I’m already paying a yearly fee just felt so cheap. I was already pretty unhappy with the direction Amazon had been heading; that email was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

My Amazon purchase volume dropped by 60% the following year, and another 10% the year after that. My goal is to get it down to 0, or at least in the single-digits of yearly orders.

I strongly recommend purchasing a USB bluray player + then buying shiny metal disks to feed it (or finding your public library, of course!)

Used + overstock disks are << $10. I go to the store and grab what I want. I typically leave with about 30 movies / TV seasons for $100. They're far higher quality than the content that is included with amazon prime, and typically cost about 10% as much as the "buy movie" price for the same film.

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.

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

This is how all the podcasts I donate to work (they offer ad-free feeds, bonus episodes, etc, usually with some url like https://rss.podcastsite.com/show?token=<random code>, and then in my podcast app, it either says "Some show - Paid feed", or sometimes "Some show - your name's feed".

Substack does and it's first class. Patreon does a decent job.

> You can find the RSS feed for your publication at https://your.substack.com/feed.

> Replace "your" with the name of your Substack publication.

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.

RSS scraping is just 100x easier and some publications have taken notice.

I've seen some publications are transitioning to extreme hard paywalls and are even harder to scrape.

https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder

In my spare time I'm developing a web RSS reader and considering effectively a Spotify model where users optionally have a paid subscription that is shared to article publishers to address the ethics of simply free stripping of ads as a service. I'd like it to be an optional paywall but haven't decided how to move forward

Ah, you mean, like the NYTimes RSS feed. The NYTimes (and other paywall sites) only render the headline and one-sentence article summary. Like this:

> Not All Malls Are Struggling

> A certain type of shopping mall has become a surprising bright spot for real estate investors.

You do not…please correct me if I’m wrong…and cannot get a full-text RSS feed from the Times. Or Slate. Or [insert legacy media company here].

Which is deeply frustrating. It’s obviously a way to cut off the most blatant way for a bot to scrape the site, but c’mon, please, media tech teams, we can make private subscription RSS feeds work for podcasts, we can make it work for news. Your most engaged and nerdy and tech literate customers will go for it.

In lieu of that, I use Safari, and I have it set to automatically pop into Reader mode (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/hide-distractions-whe...) when I hit certain websites. While I would prefer to read my news in NetNewsWire, hitting a de-shittified reader view in Safari is a decent fallback.

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.

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.

Apollo was much better, of course.

I love Mastodon, it’s what I use, but it’s not what I lost with Twitter. Some stayed, some went to BlueSky, some Threads, some just gave up. And we’ll never have it again. Assholes destroyed a whole world out of selfishness.

I wonder how this works on mobile data though which is significantlym more expensive than home network data.

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).

While I use ad-blockers and the like, I know I’m far from the norm.

4300 requests, 238 MB downloaded

With Firefox and all extensions disabled

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.

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)

1920 x 1080 @ 100%

> I guess you're using a retina-like display ?

I don't think so. It's a T14 Gen 2a.

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?

I think Firefox just rolled out some kind of autocomplete; I haven't compensated yet.

If you're making half a mil designing spyware for Palantir, different story.

Also, thank you to the six people who download those 500MB to keep the site alive for the rest of us.

I can take a single photo with my iPhone that is larger than a Windows 95 installation depending on my output settings.

The 39.99MB of ads accompanying the 2KB of text you want to read possibly has less utility to you.

Also consider the utility of an ad blocker.

Maybe it's different if advertisers or publishers are paying viewer's data costs. But some amount of restraint might be nice. Personally, I don't use a lot on my phone when I'm out and about, other than chat apps, hn, text NPR and lite CNN, cause I used to be on a plan with a hard cutoff. But then, I have unmetered networking at home.

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.

The question I guess is really if PC Gamer earns more by sending 100 mb / minute and chasing some eyeballs away faster, than by using a reasonable amount of data and losing eyeballs at the normal rate of attrition for written word outlets.

1600x1200 is limited to 256 colors. However, you can still get up to 16-24bit at higher resolutions than many modern Win11 laptops support.

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.

A DVD (single layer) holds about 4.7GB of data.

Just for ads on a website.

700MB “rips” are heavily compressed with modern codecs.

Plus, if I decide to download a music video, that's on me. I chose to download a 100mb file.

If I just want to read what amounts to a few paragraphs of text with some branding, I don't think it's fair to say that I'm also choosing to download 40+mb of nonsense that isn't text. Maybe in this new modern web, that is a conscious decision I make by clicking on any link anywhere, but I think the point of the article is that it shouldn't be the case.

yes, it would be better if all ads were text only, so there wouldn't be this adtech fucking warfare for people's attention

It's very likely that ad providers expect that.

The future is today!

You can still subscribe to the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

It's one way of avoiding AI garbage.

(Is 3150x2210 a normal resolution / aspect ratio for those, anyway?)

So, the screenshot is probably a semi-upscaled image of a ~ 1920x1200 desktop.

By default, I browse without JS. If I get to a website that I want to explore that requires JS, I turn it on with one click:

https://github.com/maximelebreton/quick-javascript-switcher

I run both side-by-side.

https://github.com/hackademix/noscript

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

I used to use NextDNS a lot but some things would get messed up so I'd have to sometimes disable it and then I got lazy and just have kept it off for like a year

On Android is there a better solution when using Chrome?

edit: Erp, actually, it seems mobile Chrome doesn't have extension support. I only actually use Chrome on a Chromebook, I assumed Android was comparable.

most of the browsers have built-in adblockers, but I would suggest to stay way from browsers not supporting extensions

other browsers with (limited) extension support on Android - Edge (MS), Yandex (RU), Quetta (CN), Kiwi browser (discontinued, I used this, then switched to IceRaven FF fork, the UI still ain't as good, but at least it's developed)

So when it comes to this bloat, publishers bear both fault and the responsibility to fix the problem. The viewer bears neither.

The website is around PC Gaming - users with the top of the line machines and fast internet. I don't see a problem with websites catering to their audience?

Why should I get a worse lower quality website full of text and nothing visual because somebody else has limited data?

The average news article text (only) is usually less than 20 kb.

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/meet-the-team/

They don't see it as money made through ripping off users without their consent - they think they are entitled to that money. Anything that leads to less money in the name of usability, transparency and honesty is just met with a shrug.

To them, the author of the article and the rest of us are just rambling developers who don't understand how businesses work. And they are the gold standard (they think so) for business ethics. So tell me again, do you really think they will do "something" about that?

Just as soon as...what? How are two of the top three people named on the "Meet the team" page simultaneously oblivious to the half gig of ad downloads and on the verge of caring?

Forgive us for not trusting you on this.

Of course they can be - and probably are - unknowing of some erroneous code in one of their thousands of articles.

Prejudicial and cynical, nice.

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.

I recently got hit by an "article" that promised to tell me which three AAA games would be released with PS Plus soon. A three point bullet list was all I wanted. Instead I got pages after pages of word-manure about nothing at all for reasons I don't even understand. At the end of it I still couldn't tell you which three games the article was supposed to tell me about.

I foresee a bleak feature where we will deploy AI as "content blockers" to extract the useful content from the word-manure that is becoming the preferred way of working among internet "authors".

AI amplifies the problem by making it easier to produce filler, but the problem is whatever metrics are behind the monetization. You need users to "engage" with your content for at least x amount of time to earn y amount of money, while instead the earnings should be relative to and directly derived from how useful the content is to how many users.

More writing means more space to shove ads in between every paragraph.

Exactly how did you "get hit" by an article? Did somebody hack your computer and pointed your browser to it? Or did somebody ambush you on your walk to work and show a magazine with the article into your face?

If you seek out content from low quality sources, you get the low quality treatment. The only way for consumers to fight this is by paying for good quality content, which is often possible.

Burger King isn't going to improve the quality of their burgers or service by customers complaining. They'll do something when they see customers going somewhere else.

It's something that happens rarely enough for me to not having developed an automatic "aw hell nah, no f-ing way" filter towards it anyway, and I (naively) did click the notification and "got hit" by the article.

My grandmother is a gamer. But a bit senile. She had her formative gaming years on the XBox, you see. What she actually meant to ask was: which titles for the PS Plus One?

My dad too has been asking me that question. Or he did until he tragically died in a car accident last week.

So which AAA games will be released for PS Plus One soon or soon-ish?

I really had to ponder that question while driving my Tesla Cybertruck to the gas station. Indeed, which games are that? It’s on everyone’s lips or mouth.

Which brings us to this article. You have been wondering the same thing, haven’t you? If so you are in good company, like that of my beloved grandmother and dear departed father.

Sony says that they will reveal which three AAA titles will be released for PS Plus One in the fourth quarter of 2027.

If you let your guard down, someone will mess up and let malware through.

Adblockers are security.

Yes it’s poorly designed and annoying, I don’t ses where you get ‘ripping off’ from. It makes you sound like a rambling developer who doesn’t understand how businesses wor

That said, I’ve had to work on projects that I’m not 100% proud of. I’ve had the companies I work for get complained about and in a few cases I had to work on the thing that was being complained about.

It’s hard to argue with a balance sheet.

I can't believe the year has finally come! I also cannot believe the year starts with a "2".

A simple site of lyrics, or newspapers that start videos automatically. Github was worse, now at least opens a bit more faster, but still very poorer than, example, codeberg. Sites are sites, most want to do fancy things more than to simply let user read its contents.

Would be nice a site that could track it to put some shame. By now, the better sites are just like HN, Wikipedia... unobstrusive and fast even without cache.

The linked article doesn’t offer any real remedies, so I will:

* Step one: dump Microsoft Edge, install Brave, which stops most ads including those on YouTube.

* Step two: dump Windows, install Linux. Windows 11 is an advertising delivery organ masquerading as an operating system.

* Step three: put a list of advertiser IP addresses in the Linux lookup table /etc/hosts, stopping the problem at its source. This idea works in Windows too, but most Windows users aren’t techies.

* Step four: never open an account to gain access to a Website’s content. Websites require you to sign up only so they can legally mail you advertising without breaking the law.

* Want to hear the FBI’s advice on this topic? To avoid many online dangers, they warn you to install an ad blocker (https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2022/PSA221221).

But most ad blockers now let some ads through ... only “good ones,” meaning those who pay enough to circumvent the filter.

Most advertising is BS anyway. Prove me wrong -- tell me the last time you saw an ad for potatoes. Or a walk in the park.

Most advertising is actually a meta-ad for consumerism -- you need to buy stuff. What you have isn't good enough. But hey -- don't get me started.

Install AdNauseam if you have unmetered connection and let it download as much data from them as it can.

ima start browsing the web via lynx 100% now

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.

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.

Completely impossible to use on mobile phone.

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Browsing and not using these tools nowadays is volunteering for a bad time, IMO.

So yeah. It might be bad, but I can only recommend everyone on low-data-rates/plans to always use an adblock/contentblocker.

(169 requests, 10.59MB / 3.28 MB transferred), total time 1.10 min)

I would not have expected a 'dark mode' extension to cause that.

- i read a post of NYTimes the other day, can we get people to submit this stuff which is far more useful than half the vibe coded AI slop apps?

I now use an ad blocker instead. I’m not proud of it, but being actively hostile to me is something I don’t quite understand especially when I’m trying hard to give them money.