Top
Best
New

Posted by JumpCrisscross 1 day ago

PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading(stuartbreckenridge.net)
801 points | 364 commentspage 3
cozzyd 8 hours ago|
37 millibar? That's quite the bird's eye view.
alexchengyuli 13 hours ago||
Sadly many people wouldn't even notice 500MB anymore. That's kind of the point. A PS2 game was 4GB. Now a single update patch is 50GB. Software stopped being designed for everyone a long time ago. It's just more obvious when it's a 500MB article about RSS readers.
notepad0x90 1 day ago||
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.

PhilippGille 1 day ago||
On Kagi you can increase/decrease a domain's ranking for your personal search results, and they make the aggregated stats public, showing for example Pinterest as the most blocked site, which matches part of what you're looking for: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights
notepad0x90 5 hours ago|||
I'm hoping/dreaming it would be browser-standard, as a protocol. Kagi would be one of the reputation providers in that scheme.
al_borland 1 day ago||||
I hope whoever is running Pinterest sees they are the top 7 most blocked sites.
hedora 18 hours ago||
...and that whoever is running HN sees that they are the #5 raised, and #5 pinned site.
1bpp 18 hours ago|||
Funny to see w3schools.com ranking above Twitter.
herb_derb 1 day ago|||
I wonder if you could automate the rating. Suppose you had some sort of engine where people could search for things, and the pages that get more clicks would have a higher rank. Plus you could supplement that by tracing links, since better pages will probably link to each other. As long as you promise to do no evil, I bet this would be a pretty good system.
Barbing 1 day ago|||
I suppose Google’s doing this and they’ve built it into Chrome which is what grandma is using anyway, but what I’ve seen change over the past 20 years is the way these losers automate the cycling of their domains which are now registered with companies who couldn’t care less about phishing.

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)

robotnikman 22 hours ago||
I remember in the 2000's there was a site that did exactly this. I can't remember the name now though, maybe someone else will know what I'm talking about.
arkt8 20 hours ago||
I have no metrics but there is a lot (if not most of) sites with similar issues.

A simple site of lyrics, or newspapers that start videos automatically. Github was worse, now at least opens a bit more faster, but still very poorer than, example, codeberg. Sites are sites, most want to do fancy things more than to simply let user read its contents.

Would be nice a site that could track it to put some shame. By now, the better sites are just like HN, Wikipedia... unobstrusive and fast even without cache.

goldenarm 1 day ago||
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

timthowtdi 1 day ago||
I use the iOS app of https://brutalist.report for this these days.
bryanhogan 18 hours ago|||
You can get the main content of a page as markdown via something like https://defuddle.md/

I sometimes read things via Feeder (the Android app) and there I can also pull in some content, even things that aren't included in the original RSS.

PlunderBunny 1 day ago|||
Lighthouse can sometimes find RSS feeds for pages that don’t show an RSS button on the page:

https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder

Marsymars 19 hours ago|||
I just don't pay for sites that don't offer full-text RSS (or email newsletters, for some sites) for subscribers.
mrweasel 1 day ago|||
Disable Javascript or use Lynx, Links or Dillo to open the articles from your newsreader. Some pages won't work obviously, you remove those from your feed.
goodmythical 1 day ago||
no love for elinks?
4k93n2 15 hours ago|||
i think rsshub can help with this, but im not 100% sure. its something you have to self host yourself, or pay a service like pikapods to run it for you
dbtc 1 day ago|||
Maybe not considered a solution, but: print.
righthand 1 day ago|||
Reader mode + ad blocker
bryancoxwell 1 day ago||
Further: configure reader mode as the default for the sites you’re most commonly linked to.
themafia 1 day ago|||
> no paid media provides full articles in RSS anymore

Substack does and it's first class. Patreon does a decent job.

specproc 1 day ago||
Not an RSS solution, also relies on US-based third parties.
hedora 18 hours ago||
From TFM:

> You can find the RSS feed for your publication at https://your.substack.com/feed.

> Replace "your" with the name of your Substack publication.

impure 1 day ago|||
There are readers with a 'full text mode' which will fetch the website and display it in something like Mozilla's Readability view. It does not always work, especially if the page is paywalled but it works for most sites.
goldenarm 1 day ago||
Most quality journals are paywalled nowadays, I'm considering to scrape using my cookie, or maybe use archive.is..
hedora 18 hours ago|||
If you're paying, there's probably a way to get a RSS feed for paid subscribers. If you can't find it, maybe email tech support?

This is how all the podcasts I donate to work (they offer ad-free feeds, bonus episodes, etc, usually with some url like https://rss.podcastsite.com/show?token=<random code>, and then in my podcast app, it either says "Some show - Paid feed", or sometimes "Some show - your name's feed".

1bpp 1 day ago|||
For a lot of sites Firefox's reader mode is great at bypassing paywalls, just turn it on & refresh
perardi 1 day ago|||
> 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.

colesantiago 1 day ago|||
Pay for the web or print edition?

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.

Marsymars 19 hours ago||
I don't think the complaint is that RSS doesn't get around paywalls, it's that even if you pay, many publications don't offer full-text RSS.
colesantiago 9 hours ago||
Because AI bots will scrape the full text RSS.
Marsymars 7 hours ago||
How is a web page with the full text more resistant to that than an RSS feed with the full text?
colechristensen 1 day ago||
I have thought of this, and I have thoughts about the ethics of this.

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

cxplay 10 hours ago||
You don't need RSS; you need AdBlock.
cxplay 8 hours ago|
Try next filters:

  www.pcgamer.com##aside#affiliate-disclaimer
  www.pcgamer.com##aside[data-component-name="Recirculation:ArticleRiver"]
  www.pcgamer.com##aside[data-mrf-recirculation="article-river-stacked"]
  www.pcgamer.com##div.slice-container-newsletterForm
  www.pcgamer.com##div[data-widget-type="deal"]
  www.pcgamer.com##span.article-continues-below
  www.pcgamer.com#$#div.widget-area-group {display: block;}
  www.pcgamer.com#$#div.widget-area.basis-full {width: 100%;}
  www.pcgamer.com$$div[id="slice-container-popularBox"]
  www.pcgamer.com$$script[type="text/javascript"][data-id]
  ||pcgamer.com$to=~viafoura.co,script
rpgbr 9 hours ago||
Wipr 2 ad blocker for Safari reduced the transfer size of PC World article to 3,5 MB.
onra87 14 hours ago||
I'm just going to blacklist this kind of website. I get that they need advertising to survive. But taken to this extreme, it's just disrespectful to their readers.
red_hare 23 hours ago||
TheVerge launched a full RSS Feed for paid subscribers about a year ago and I've never so happily subscribed to something.
djoldman 1 day ago|
I can't recommend enough limiting JS to an allowlist.

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:

https://github.com/maximelebreton/quick-javascript-switcher

nickburns 21 hours ago|
NoScript is the standard for this, with uBlock Origin being something like its 'spiritual successor'.

I run both side-by-side.

https://github.com/hackademix/noscript

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

More comments...