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

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.

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

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.

this just reminds me of...

- watching "normal" cable tv

- listening to "normal" fm radio

- shopping on amazon (sponsored... everything)

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'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

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.

It seems the author’s browser is severely misconfigured. The PC Gamer website works fine for me. I can read the contents of the article he linked to with no issues or distractions and it loads instantly.