The title buried the lede.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

Back in the day, when you saw as many ads or popups as some websites show today, it usually meant you had at least 3 viruses on the computer.

I recall hating the PC Gamer web site back in the late 90’s. It was sluggish on modem because of the banner ads and the heavy use of GIF decorations on their pages. Nothing is new under the sun. Well, they used to have some great articles…

To measure network load, open dev tools, uncheck "disable caches" then clear your browser cache then load the page. Screenshot indicates network cache is disabled so the stated number is inflated.

The person who wrote the article and the people in charge of the site are different.

At this point, if you browse the internet without an adblock; it is on YOU.

This everywhere now, any Website that belongs to Windows Central parent company is now an unusable mess of ads, videos, the comments are a micro webapp that takes seconds to download.

Completely impossible to use on mobile phone.

Thank God for uMatrix. Seriously, I don't know how I lived without that thing. Load times on everything are at least 30% faster.

I'm trying to think in the other (wrong) direction. If we can't escape funding things with advertising the document format can be improved to facilitate what people are trying to build. If each page view needs to be a full multiplayer auction it doesn't need to be this heavy. Not creating something like this will also exclude sane minds from what should and what shouldn't be included and put a price tag on questionable things. For ad platforms micro payments are normal. One can already pay for participating in the auction. If you fail to win the top slots your ticket is still good for less popular ones etc

These ad companies pay for transfer too.

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

I immediately thought of this article: https://growtika.com/blog/tech-media-collapse . These websites are losing market share to search and AI; clinging to their business model I suspect they are forced to display an inordinate amount of advertising to make up for their dwindling views. The value they provide is still there, but the advertising revenue that paid for it is not.

This reminds me of the bug I experienced on gcp console with dark reader. Somehow this caused a memory leak, and one could watch the page slowly consume GBs of memory. I once came back from lunch to see it had eaten all ram on my MBP and had consumed a massive amount of swap.

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

With adblock loaded, the page loaded a whopping 10MB, after scrolling all the way to the bottom.

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)

And this is why I pi-hole (although I am thinking of changing to technitium)

The first Harry Potter ebook (with art) was about 1.3mb.

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

Even more embarassing is that the article adds really nothing to whatever was written before about rss. Probably gobbled up by AI

37 millibar? That's quite the bird's eye view.

Sadly many people wouldn't even notice 500MB anymore. That's kind of the point. A PS2 game was 4GB. Now a single update patch is 50GB. Software stopped being designed for everyone a long time ago. It's just more obvious when it's a 500MB article about RSS readers.

we need some sort of a universal crowd-sourced site rating system. Things like user experience, scamminess, user-hostility, site ownership-affiliations,etc.. all opt-in by users of course, you setup the criteria that is important to you and the browser displays different ratings or blocks certain sites (like scammy/fraudulent ones) out right. The reputation providers would also be selectable like search engines. I'd imagine there would be crowdsourced lists of all sorts.

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.

I have no metrics but there is a lot (if not most of) sites with similar issues.

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.

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 don't need RSS; you need AdBlock.

Wipr 2 ad blocker for Safari reduced the transfer size of PC World article to 3,5 MB.

I'm just going to blacklist this kind of website. I get that they need advertising to survive. But taken to this extreme, it's just disrespectful to their readers.

TheVerge launched a full RSS Feed for paid subscribers about a year ago and I've never so happily subscribed to something.

I can't recommend enough limiting JS to an allowlist.

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

noscript, ublock origin, reader view: the referenced page loads in 2s on a bad connection and downloads no ads while remaining perfectly readable.

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

+1 for FreshRSS (recommended at the bottom of the PC Gamer article). I just started my mass migration to self-hosting (it's way better in 2026 than it used to be), and I'm very pleased with the FreshRSS webapp and NetNewsWire integration. I consider it a solid hedge against enshittification. I probably won't go full self-hosting, but I'm enjoying the move.

this just reminds me of...

- watching "normal" cable tv

- listening to "normal" fm radio

- shopping on amazon (sponsored... everything)

This was the exact motivation that led me to develop my own news feed for a vulnerability dashboard I'm working on. I would wait for my NVD API calls to finish by scrolling tech sites but was always inundated by ads...

- can we get a trend on HN here of all the websites doing this currnetly?

- 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?

Looking at the title, I was confused why a recommendation of some random PC gamer is interesting. Capitalization is important.

The modern Web is truly unusable without an aggressive DNS filter and/or uBlock.

It's 3.60 MB with NoScript enabled.

Trying to use the internet without an adblocker is honestly a tragic and harrowing experience.

That's outrageous—advertisements have really gone too far.

Disabling cache and then complaining that the bandwidth usage never stops increasing is certainly a take, but I'm not sure you can meaningfully draw any conclusions from it.

in warhammer40k surfing without adblocker would be herasy

it's relatively easy for an ai to write such an article now, just open all websites and gather metrics while crawling...

and they wonder why we use adblockers.

ima start browsing the web via lynx 100% now

This is the cable tv final enshittification from the 90s, every second of the hour being crammed with ads because that’s the last little bit of money that can be squeezed after google took away all the attention

How much would that be costing them? Thats a lot of data to serve for no reason.

Being alerted to, and preventing this, should be a built-in feature of the browser.

Imagine trying to run an ad supported business to a bunch of people who are avid proponents of ad blocking.

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

This is so upsetting. No wonder people spend more time in mobile apps than they do using the mobile web - the default web experience on so many sites is terrible.

Well, it's otherwise “free” to read the article so I guess this is how one “pays” in the end.

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

I hate ads as much as anyone, but the OP article would be more convincing if it didn't itself include 6MB worth of screenshots.

wtf is this tittle

Typical example of a fraudster

Holy shit that is horrifying.

Wait a sec -- the reason RSS readers don’t have ads is because no one uses them. If we all used RSS, the advertisers would follow us there.

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.

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Not a problem for me (Unlimited data plan, 1000/40).

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?