> 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.
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.
"I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? 10 dollars?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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:
I run both side-by-side.
The average news article text (only) is usually less than 20 kb.
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
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.
Substack does and it's first class. Patreon does a decent job.
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
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
Also, thank you to the six people who download those 500MB to keep the site alive for the rest of us.
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
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?
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/meet-the-team/