Hacker News still has a feed (that's the only reason why I saw this thread). And Reddit gives you a feed for your subscribed subreddits.
Google Reader was never the answer. It's such a shame that people even here don't realize that relying on Google for that had interests at odds - and you weren't part of the equation at all.
Well, except for your data. You didn't give them enough data. So they shut down shop. Gmail though, ammirite? :D
Yeah I wonder why gmail was not one of the shut down products /s
I should really run some to tests to figure out how much lighter the load on my link is thanks to the filter.
I also manually added some additional domains (mostly fonts by Google and Adobe) to further reduce load and improve privacy.
Not done any rigorous tests but my experience has been rhat it can be lower than a tenth.
You have 20 ads scattered around, an autoplaying video of some random recipe/ad, 2-3 popups to subscribe, buy some affiliated product and then the author's life story and then a story ABOUT the recipe before I am able to see the detailed recipe in the proper format.
It's second nature to open all these websites in reader mode for me atp.
The answer is really simple and follows on from this article; the purpose of the app is even more privacy violation and tracking.
4 MB was an absurd size for a website in 2008. It's still an absurd size for a website.
And it works without JavaScript... but there does appear to be some tracking stuff. A deferred call out to Cloudflare, a hit counter I think? and some inline stuff at the bottom that defers some local CDN thing the old-fashioned way. Noscript catches all of this and I didn't feel like allowing it in order to weigh it.