DEV-TOOLSMarch 22, 20261 min read18 views

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

A critique of a PC Gamer article that ironically consumes massive amounts of data and displays excessive ads while recommending RSS readers.

There’s not much worth quoting in this PC Gamer article but I do want to draw your attention to three things.

First, what you see when you navigate to the page: a notification popup, a newsletter popup that obscures the article, and a dimmed background with at least five visible ads.

Second, once you get passed the welcome mat: yes, five ads, a title and a subtitle.

Third, this is a whopping 37MB webpage on initial load. But that’s not the worst part. In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads.

We’re lucky to have so many good RSS readers that cut through this nonsense.

Footnotes

NetNewsWire, Unread, Current, and Reeder, to name a few.

Source: Hacker News

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