JumpCrisscrossPC Gamer Recommends RSS Readers in a 37MB Article That Just Keeps Downloading
https://stuartbreckenridge.net/2026-03-19-pc-gamer-recommends-rss-readers-in-a-37mb-article/
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
Further: configure reader mode as the default for the sites you’re most commonly linked to.
I use the iOS app of https://brutalist.report for this these days.
Lighthouse can sometimes find RSS feeds for pages that don’t show an RSS button on the page:
The title buried the lede.
> 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.
Oh the rest of the title is great. But if it was me I don’t think I could avoid putting the five on the front of the number.
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.
In Firefox + Unlock Origin: Downloads 5.6MB and then stops loading.
Scrolling to the bottom of the page added 3MB of images and then stopped loading.
Yet with RSS you can read between 300 and 1800 articles, depending on the feed type.
>In Firefox + Ublock Origin
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?
Just gotta pay everyone who's not an asset owner, who actually worked for their money. So much dysfunction is just a matter of the owner class cornering wage negotiations and forcing people to make due with way less pay than their labor is actually worth. People don't pay for news because they can't afford to. There's an alternate universe where everyone makes the extra 20-30 bucks a month to afford a news subscription, and they pay it, and journalism happens in the interests of the people paying. Back in ours, journalism still happens in the interests of the people paying: the owners and advertisers.
What is your screen resolution ? I have the same setup but got different results.
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)
The person who wrote the article and the people in charge of the site are different.
To use a good point of reference that I've seen others also start using lately, an installation of Windows 95 is roughly 40MB, so in loading that page you've downloaded approximately one Windows 95 installation. Then another 10+ times with the 500MB more that came after.