Posted by JumpCrisscross 1 day ago
> 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.
I recall some years back having corporate IT ask me why I was downloading terabytes off this weird website called "imgur" that they didn't know about. Realized I had a tab open with a stupid jackie chan mp4 a few seconds long on some background workspace, and that had just kept downloading over and over and over and over...
Three days into the month these phones are just ewaste.
Sure part of "software fills space like a gas" can be explained by "got to go fast to stay ahead on the market", but at some point it’s blatant negligence of frugality where it’s providing overall economical benefits.
Recently tried to alter a phone plan on EE’s website, something that should have involved a few clicks. It was slow (literal seconds to open a page) and clunky. The Javascript console was bleeding error messages, and it looked like they’d used every Javascript framework under the sun. And after all that it just gave me an error message saying that the transaction could not be processed.
Gave up and texted (old school SMS) their help line. With a few text messages I was able to change plans. Probably used under 500 bytes to accomplish what the bloated and broken website couldn’t.
Despite years of being too lazy/anxious to figure out phone number portability, I ultimately ended up switching carriers from Simple to Mint because it was just too annoying.
There's dozens of things to optimize for in software development, with resource usage being only a few of them (as CPU, memory, and network are different targets). Who are you to decide which are the most important? And if you think that you can do a better job at picking the right trades while keeping companies in business, then you would be able to make a lot of money doing so.
But you won't. The actual reason why companies (and even personal and open-source software projects) make these "wasteful" design decisions is because normal users have clearly indicated their priorities. The majority of people would rather trade some performance for a "modern" web design, and have heavy videos rather than lightweight text to give a product overview, and want that one particular feature that adds cat ears to their profile photo and if the competition has it they'll switch.
Do I think these priorities are wrong and stupid? Absolutely. I hate bloated web pages and slow applications. But empirically, with billions of dollars of evidence, these are decisions driven by users' and customers' priorities.
Look at sites built for professionals, like Digikey and McMaster-Carr - far better designed and more performant, because they cater to customers that care about those things.
It's extremely obvious what users prioritize. And if you think that "they don't know what's best for them, but I do" - what makes you any better than a member of the economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?
That’s precisely the elephant in the room. Money is a distortion and filtering lense that makes obvious things look inexistent until the wall it renders invisible is hit — at high the highest speed it could reach before that.
Reality is extremely poorly summarized within the frame of a single scalar value.
>And if you think that "they don't know what's best for them, but I do" - what makes you any better than a member of the economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?
First of all, there no necessity to go into a you/I or them/us mindset. Also it’s not because some group don’t know what’s best for themselves that any other group will know better — whatever the label given the this other group: "I" or "too-big-to-fail Inc.".
This whole message also seem to assume some kind of full rationalization based on user priorities. But user base to a large extent takes what’s the most obviously thrown at their face. They sometime can tweak their applications if it does give some options to do so, or switch to some alternative if there are not trapped in a defacto oligopoly.
Do people want LLMs thrown at their face at every single corner of their digital interactions? Or is the the "throw it at every single surface indiscriminately and see what stick" driven by the hope that something will stick and make the capital venture lottery produce a few winner take it all?
To my mind users are simply using what’s put in front of them. They lack the technical knowledge to know better things are possible and even if they did they don’t have any way to advocate for it. Over half of US users use an ad blocker:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/
That alone suggests to me that when given a choice users actually do care.
You really think it's the users asking for bloated webpages? Reddit has been pushing their reddit redesign forever now. No users ever asked for it. There is a large community of users that insist on using the old.reddit interface, and reddit has been chipping away by slowly breaking more and more things (most recently, the mod page).
Compare that with hacker news or craig's list. They're still super light weight, fit for purpose, and I am forever thankful the webdevs (dang,etc) responsible for them did not succumb to the temptation to 'web 2.0/SPA' it.
It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks. See also, how nobody builds 'starter' homes anymore. There's a huge unmet market for it, but homebuilders find building mcMansions to be more profitable, so that's what gets built.
The customer.
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.
So you're stuck in a loop of not being able to use the web because the websites keep downloading stuff you don't need.
The obvious easy fix is to give them unlimited data. If the intent is to give them internet, they should give them internet that functions for the modern web.
Cell phone systems already have some tiering built in, at least based on the fine print I've read about my plans. Once I run out of "official data" I fall back to low-priority usage, but the cell system is generally so well-provisioned nowadays that I hardly notice. In 2026, one must take explicit action to force people back to 2G. Nothing would stop these plans from, say, simply always being "low priority usage" but at full speed, and for the most part this would satisfy everyone.
This sort of clause reeks of "it was written into a contract 15 years ago and nobody has even so much as thought about it since then" rather than some sort of choice.
Data caps are to an extent “fake”, in that telcos’ costs aren’t measured in how many bytes their customers download/upload. Telcos’ costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.
And for popular websites, they will cache lots of content on their own network or peer directly with data centers so they don’t have to pay for the bandwidth there. The routers will continue routing and the switches will continue switching whether you download 5GBs or 5TBs.
One more way to understand how much of a scam mobile data caps are, is that the same ISP will sell you unlimited fiber plans even though essentially your traffic goes through the same backbone.
Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers, but they don’t need to be as low as they are today.
In the long run, all costs are variable. Phone companies lack the bandwidth to provide all their customers unlimited data all the time. Most of them can’t even provide full speeds to their existing customers at peak times. If they gave everyone unlimited data they’d have to get more bandwidth, and they’d pass on every penny of the cost.
Data caps make congestion worse, because you are more likely to restrict where you use data and people are predictable. You'll no longer use bits everywhere because you care less, you'll use it where everyone else does.
In the case of TFA, PC Gamer isn't directly consuming the bandwidth with their own servers on their own domain name. It's an ad distribution network doing that, and odds are reasonable they're already colocated someplace with your ISP and the bandwidth consumed by ads is totally irrelevant to everyone except the poor sap at the home end of the last mile.
But even if that wasn't a thing - the way it's ruined watching sports now, with the constant odds flashing, etc, I'd ban it JUST for that, on top of all the detrimental effects on society.
I don't remember "I can't throw money away on this football play" being a massive society wide problem that needed fixing in 2010, pretty sure everyone could bet with their friends already.
Just wait 15 years when the middle class has been struggling with easily accessible gambling and it can't be explained as problem of character. There will be laws passed and people prosecuted or successfully sued.
Those folks that did fall to it, then became (often) lower class while failing to it.
The thing to realize, is that the upper classes ‘eat their own’ just like any other. It’s why Trump is as frantic as he is, he knows what will happen when he stops being ‘useful’/necessary.
They can also just go to the local library or Starbucks for the WiFi if they need more.
You can barely even use FB messenger (you need to get messenger-lite).
I only know this cuz tmobile would give you free 2g all over europe. it was JUST BARELY helpful. mostly just sms and email.
google maps was unusable etc. This only got worse over the years.
They now give you free 3G and it's bearable. 2G is insanely slow in the 2020+ world.
2G ~= 5 KB/s. That means 40 seconds just to download a properly optimized react bundle.
5MB site? 16+ minutes.
Note that many European countries have already got rid of their 3G networks completely [0]. So it's either "you have 4G/5G" or "the internet is pretty much unusable", nothing in between.
As someone living in a European country with no 3G network, my experience with mobile data is that when my phone fails to find a 4G signal and switches to 2G (pretty much only happens in remote areas, thankfully), I can as well send my packets using a pigeon carrier, they're going to arrive to the destination sooner.
My experience with 2G speeds is:
1. Open job application site
2. Upload resume pdf
3. Upload required picture of ID
4. Server's nginx config has a hard-coded timeout after 1 minute. Connection error
5. Try to upload again
6. Connection error
A huge number of pieces of the web have hardcoded timeouts and limits designed to stop slowloris style attacks, and if your connection is slow enough, those will prevent you from ever being able to complete some tasks.
I've paid for 2GB/mo for years now. I think I ran out once.
2G is really from a different age. Does anyone remember WAP and i-mode? I was certainly not able to afford data back then, but that is what all the business’y types were raving about.
2G EDGE was 384 kbit/s (48 kB/s) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G). That means 21 seconds to download a 1 MB page.
I just loaded the careers page at my employer, and the page weighed in at 3.6 MB, so you're talking 75 seconds.
I guess you could configure it not to do that, or write your own imap client with better behavior -- on your 2G smartphone.
"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.
https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/
When the power's out and broadband is down, if you are lucky the cell network is still up. However, everyone fails over to it simultaneously, so there's no way you'll get 2G speeds out of your 5G plan with 5 bars.
I throttled my browser dev tools to 2G and clicked reload. After 2+ minutes, it popped up a "It looks like you are on a slow connection" modal (sometimes this loads on top of the outage info, obscuring the data you want!), so I clicked "Use low bandwidth version". After 51 seconds, the debugger says page load is finished (for the low bandwidth one), but the page is just a white background, and the browser "loading" animation is still running.
After 2.17 more minutes, I get a form where you can type in an address + a bunch of irrelevant info. I typed an address, waited a minute, then typed this paragraph. After 1.5 minutes, it showed my address in the autocomplete menu, and I clicked it.
33 seconds later, it started loading a google maps ajax. 47 seconds after that, it displayed a header, with a white body. 1.33 minutes later, ignoring styling, it returned the string "power is on".
(No map, etc, at this point.)
Had this been a real outage in a storm, I'd be standing outside in the rain, or in a situation where getting cell coverage for more than 30 seconds at a time is impossible if you're holding the phone. I usually just put the phone on a carefully placed chair, then back away slowly.
Anyway it takes 9 minutes under ideal scenarios (no drops) to send 30 bytes of address, and an 11 byte response. 44 bytes / 540 seconds = 0.08 bytes per second good put.
For reference, voyager can send 20 bytes per second, so it's 250x faster than this. Morse code / telegraphs are typically sent at 1.5 words per minute, where a word is 15 characters, so 0.375 bytes per second = 4.6x faster.
Remember, these are simulated conditions for the PG&E site. My record best time getting it to load during a major outage is 45 minutes, not 9.
But I can promise you from sitting with them dozens of times things like Google Maps are unusable once the connection is throttled. It might load some of the map, some of the time. But it never loads all of it and it is just plain unworkable. Even if it loads some of it it takes so long that the busses have gone past by the time they've tried to figure out what direction they need to go.
The worst thing is load balancers with a 10 or 20 second timeout, because there's almost nothing you can do other than use Opera Mini or something.
At that point, why would you use Google Maps at all? Osmand will do the same thing, and requires no connection.
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.
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/plan-ahead-phase-out-3g...
The FCC page you linked is talking about major carriers decommissioning 3G.
The grandparent comment is talking about rural/remote areas that no major carrier served in the first place.
This doesn’t jibe with my experience trying to make phone calls on rural highways, where it seems there is no signal whatsoever more often than not.
I suppose this could be because ATT-Verizon-T-Mobile used to have 2G in that area (which was discontinued — 900Mhz analog voice band, also decommissioned) has moved on and left swathes of the US without signal, whereas, certain areas (commenter omits an example) never were served by major telecoms and have “evolved” their tech more slowly, so 3G is not decommissioned in those places. In that sense yes there is no contradiction. It still feels like we’ve gone backwards since there are places I used to be able to make a phone call that are now considered remote area with satellite SOS being you’re only way to reach someone
But even beside that, AFAICT USCellular shut down 3G in January 2024, Appalachian Wireless in Dec 2022, Cellcom in Dec 2023, and C Spire sometime in 2022.
I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.
Thank you for proving my point, that people on HN falsely think they know more than others because they can Google a link, even though what's happening on the ground is entirely different.
Reality ≠ policy papers, press releases, or web links.
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.
Some of these guys have been locked up for 40 years straight. They're not doing all that extra stuff. They want to go on Indeed or Monster or YouTube. One job site I had to load on my desktop to find out why it wasn't working for them, only to discover the pages had a 250MB payload of random crap downloading, including videos.
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.
The issue is that the wifi isn't available where they need it. If I send them to the SSA building to get some federal docs, it's in a dead zone. It might be in the middle of Chicago but there isn't any free wifi for a mile in any direction from there. How do they pull up Google Maps to get home? And it's not always obvious how to get the free wifi as it doesn't just let you connect, you had to go through a multi-step process of signing in and accepting T&Cs these days. Which the phone doesn't always want to do.
I can tell you don’t actually have to use it because if you did you’d know your statement isn’t accurate.
I've traveled Greyhound and Amtrak recently. They both advertise free wifi, but it's quite clear they no longer prioritize keeping it working.
Libraries are (probably/hopefully) an exception. But, seeing as Starbucks has been wanting to discourage people from hanging out in recent months, I wouldn't count on Starbucks wifi being reliable.
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.
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.
During the iOS 26 upgrade cycle, iOS deleted all my third-party map apps and then expired the locally downloaded apple maps. My phone also somehow lost my downloaded podcasts + music a few times, but, unlike losing three offline map applications, that didn't strand me in the middle of the woods with no cell coverage and no maps.
I agree that 4GB (or even 1GB) goes very far with a working phone OS though.
What you cannot do, contrary to what someone posted in this thread, is get by on 2G. So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure in this case.
Are you saying using 1GB of data a day on a smartphone is normal for smartphone users? I have a 10GB plan not because I need it (looking at this year, 2GB would be more than sufficient) but because that’s about the lowest I can get nowadays.
Certainly if, as indicated, the intent is for these users to have a phone for essentials, not for watching YouTube or playing music, 3 GB, IMO, should be sufficient.
Maybe YouTube or listening to music aren't strictly essentials but they also don't seem like absurd luxuries that we should be arbitrarily denying to people in 2026 to save a few cents per user on what I assume is a set of bulk purchased SIMs.
Libraries just got an increase in funding in the US in the 2026 appropriations bills.
> Maybe YouTube or listening to music aren't strictly essentials but they also don't seem like absurd luxuries that we should be arbitrarily denying to people in 2026
No-one's arbitrarily denying things. It's about what should and shouldn't be given as free things that other people work to pay for.
Ebook publishers are scamming the libraries. I shit you not, but over something like 4 years an ebook can be 10x the cost.
Most people still use sms rather than RCS or Signal or anything secure so they don’t have to pay for the data (most plans have unlimited SMS now)
Of course, the whole country has ultra-fast fibre on unmetered connections (even on the very cheapest plans), so if you’re at work or home it’s fine. Just using data on the go is a non-starter for many
Presumably, that's fast now, right? I'm surprised people don't just lean heavily on it instead of the (mismanaged?) cell network.
My daughter also has a 3GB data plan but she knows to only use whatsapp when she isn't connected to a Wifi network and we configured it to not auto load the photos and videos when on mobile data.
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.
In adtech?
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!
If we didn't have ads, people would not only need less bandwidth, they'd buy less physical junk, and quite possibly be happier for it.
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.
Untested since I run my phone via Wireguard to my home network and block everything there.
My guess is no.
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.
The question I guess is really if PC Gamer earns more by sending 100 mb / minute and chasing some eyeballs away faster, than by using a reasonable amount of data and losing eyeballs at the normal rate of attrition for written word outlets.
1600x1200 is limited to 256 colors. However, you can still get up to 16-24bit at higher resolutions than many modern Win11 laptops support.
So by reading this article on PC gamer you've now downloaded the equivalent of a full-length movie worth of low quality code and ads.
A DVD (single layer) holds about 4.7GB of data.
Just for ads on a website.
700MB “rips” are heavily compressed with modern codecs.
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.
I think Firefox just rolled out some kind of autocomplete; I haven't compensated yet.
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?
10 years ago I still had a 7GB mobile data plan (in Japan). After 7GB, it was throttled to 100kbps. If I tethered my PC and there was an update available, or browsed modern sites (especially while tethered), this could easily be wiped out in a minutes. After 7GB, sites like hackernews, google search/maps worked fine, although most search results failed to load.
5 years ago I still had a 7GB mobile data plan (in Japan). After 7GB, it was throttled to 1Mbps. If I tethered my PC and there was an update available, or browsed modern sites (especially while tethered), this could easily (and usually was) wiped out in a few minutes. Browsing reddit easily consumed 1GB in a day. After 7GB, sites like hackernews, google search/maps worked fine, although most search results failed to load.
I currently live in Europe, I am too old for dealing with the above shit or dealing with wifi in a town/restaurant/hotel so I pay for unlimited data throughout EU. But, it's fairly common while driving or training around that I end up on 3G. I understand 3G is degraded these days, but it should provide 300-2000 kbps. Almost nothing internet-related works at these speeds today. WhatsApp is the exception, it works eventually. I bet hackernews could load if you could somehow disable all the background things happening. I've had a few experiences where I reached a timeout for a login on Apple, google or MS services, and been locked out of my account for a few days because trying to login with low datarate means trying to login 30x in 10 minutes which must look suspicious.
Yesterday I was skiing at a resort and my phone was dying at an incredible rate, like 25% per hour. I don't know for certain but I suspect some app or website was retrying a download of something while in a dodgy service area. I'm sure it's happened that someone has been slightly injured going off into the trees at 2pm at a ski resort (or had a fall on parking lot ice, or fell down stairs in their home, or been run off the road), and not been able to call for help because some app has been loading ads and killed their phone battery.
Whenever you have poor service (but not none) that's when phones waste the most energy trying to crank up RF transmit power and doing retry loops. I doubt it was actually trying to download much.
You can try this by putting your phone in a homemade Faraday cage with tin foil in a Tupperware or something.
They don't see it as money made through ripping off users without their consent - they think they are entitled to that money. Anything that leads to less money in the name of usability, transparency and honesty is just met with a shrug.
To them, the author of the article and the rest of us are just rambling developers who don't understand how businesses work. And they are the gold standard (they think so) for business ethics. So tell me again, do you really think they will do "something" about that?
Simple, you can serve a reasonable amount of unobtrusive ads and I and others might turn off adblock to support the publication or you can do what you're doing, I'll keep it on and see no ads at all.
I recently got hit by an "article" that promised to tell me which three AAA games would be released with PS Plus soon. A three point bullet list was all I wanted. Instead I got pages after pages of word-manure about nothing at all for reasons I don't even understand. At the end of it I still couldn't tell you which three games the article was supposed to tell me about.
I foresee a bleak feature where we will deploy AI as "content blockers" to extract the useful content from the word-manure that is becoming the preferred way of working among internet "authors".
More writing means more space to shove ads in between every paragraph.
AI amplifies the problem by making it easier to produce filler, but the problem is whatever metrics are behind the monetization. You need users to "engage" with your content for at least x amount of time to earn y amount of money, while instead the earnings should be relative to and directly derived from how useful the content is to how many users.
Exactly how did you "get hit" by an article? Did somebody hack your computer and pointed your browser to it? Or did somebody ambush you on your walk to work and show a magazine with the article into your face?
If you seek out content from low quality sources, you get the low quality treatment. The only way for consumers to fight this is by paying for good quality content, which is often possible.
Burger King isn't going to improve the quality of their burgers or service by customers complaining. They'll do something when they see customers going somewhere else.
If you let your guard down, someone will mess up and let malware through.
Adblockers are security.
Yes it’s poorly designed and annoying, I don’t ses where you get ‘ripping off’ from. It makes you sound like a rambling developer who doesn’t understand how businesses wor
Prejudicial and cynical, nice.
Just as soon as...what? How are two of the top three people named on the "Meet the team" page simultaneously oblivious to the half gig of ad downloads and on the verge of caring?
Forgive us for not trusting you on this.
Of course they can be - and probably are - unknowing of some erroneous code in one of their thousands of articles.
That said, I’ve had to work on projects that I’m not 100% proud of. I’ve had the companies I work for get complained about and in a few cases I had to work on the thing that was being complained about.
It’s hard to argue with a balance sheet.
If you're making half a mil designing spyware for Palantir, different story.
Completely impossible to use on mobile phone.