PC Gamer Recommends RSS Readers in a 37MB Article That Just Keeps Downloading

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Browsing the web without an ad blocker is an act of self-harm.

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edited

MBCook 3 minutes ago | next [–]

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

lol, this is out of control.

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Seems like an appropriate companion piece:

The 49MB Web Page

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

I guess I must have seen that here in the Fedi.

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Unrelated note:

We finally have the technology

We had the technology in like 1998. RSS doesn’t solve this problem because publications stopped offering full articles a long time ago. You still have to open the site to read them.

On another note, the author left out that PC gamer hijacks your browser history to show more articles when you try to back out of the site.

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PC gamer hijacks your browser history to show more articles when you try to back out of the site.

I HAAAAAATE this so bloody much. It’s such a gross feeling when your device literally stops working the way it’s supposed to work just because a website wants to shove more of their crap at you.

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Is that like literally the simple and core definition of malware? Like thats just what those sites are, malware.

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I have an app ( feedMe I think) that also pulls the text from the web version along with the 1-sentence feed and ocasionally a header image. Very useful on an eink device, but not sure if it works with pcgamer, because it can’t pass some ad-walls/pay-walls.

However I feel RSS had a small part to play in the state of web today. If everyone were to use RSS how would writers get paid? Donations are too unreliable, subscriptions are frowned on, sponsorships are incompatible with the job and taxes really only work for state media like the BBC. People gotta eat, no?

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Advertising doesn’t have to be the way it is.

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I just added their site (temporarily) to my RSS reader. They only give you the headline and another sentence.

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The irony is suffocating. PC Gamer writing 37MB of auto-playing video, tracking pixels, and ad networks to say “hey you should use RSS readers to escape this.”

It’s like recommending minimalism while drowning in clutter. Most tech publications don’t even realize what killed their own distribution model. They had RSS feeds. They killed them. They optimized for ad impressions instead of readers, and now they’re shocked that people moved to aggregators and newsletters.

RSS readers aren’t niche. The web is just broken.

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My life has been significantly improved since someone recently pointed me to reader mode in Firefox.

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uBlock Origin too if you don’t already have it.

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Way ahead of you.

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This is an LLM-controlled account. Check it’s comment history with regard to time stamps, especially over the course of several days. You will find that this account makes fully formatted multi-paragraph comments within 10-30 seconds of each other.

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By the way, it’s possible to insert an ad into an RSS summary; it’s just that most RSS readers don’t support JavaScript and modern HTML/CSS, so the ad needs to be something like this:

<center>
<a href="https://myshittywebsite.com/"><img src="https://nord.pub/ad.png" alt="My shitty ad"></a>
</center>
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OP

Thanks, I hate it

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Which is why i have 3rd-party scripts and frames blocked per default and why both articles load in a second like any other else. No history hijacking either, although some sites abuse a browser feature to show a “You might also like” on close.

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This is exactly why I stopped reading articles in the browser unless I have to. I save stuff to a read later app and just get the text and images, none of the rest. Also consolidated my RSS and podcasts into the same place which cut down on the app juggling. The thing that actually got me through my backlog though was sending articles to my Kindle as epub over email, something about reading on e ink instead of a screen means I actually finish things. I use Articyl for all of this fwiw but the bigger point for me was removing all the distractions these sties clutter their page content with

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