Unrelated note:
We finally have the technology
We had the technology in like 1998. RSS doesn’t solve this problem because publications stopped offering full articles a long time ago. You still have to open the site to read them.
On another note, the author left out that PC gamer hijacks your browser history to show more articles when you try to back out of the site.
PC gamer hijacks your browser history to show more articles when you try to back out of the site.
I HAAAAAATE this so bloody much. It’s such a gross feeling when your device literally stops working the way it’s supposed to work just because a website wants to shove more of their crap at you.
I have an app ( feedMe I think) that also pulls the text from the web version along with the 1-sentence feed and ocasionally a header image. Very useful on an eink device, but not sure if it works with pcgamer, because it can’t pass some ad-walls/pay-walls.
However I feel RSS had a small part to play in the state of web today. If everyone were to use RSS how would writers get paid? Donations are too unreliable, subscriptions are frowned on, sponsorships are incompatible with the job and taxes really only work for state media like the BBC. People gotta eat, no?
Advertising doesn’t have to be the way it is.
Which is why i have 3rd-party scripts and frames blocked per default and why both articles load in a second like any other else. No history hijacking either, although some sites abuse a browser feature to show a “You might also like” on close.
Seems like an appropriate companion piece:
I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.
I guess I must have seen that here in the Fedi.
Browsing the web without an ad blocker is an act of self-harm.
Closer to assault?
By the way, it’s possible to insert an ad into an RSS summary; it’s just that most RSS readers don’t support JavaScript and modern HTML/CSS, so the ad needs to be something like this:
<center> <a href="https://myshittywebsite.com/"><img src="/ad.png" alt="My shitty ad"></a> </center>Thanks, I hate it
The irony is suffocating. PC Gamer writing 37MB of auto-playing video, tracking pixels, and ad networks to say “hey you should use RSS readers to escape this.”
It’s like recommending minimalism while drowning in clutter. Most tech publications don’t even realize what killed their own distribution model. They had RSS feeds. They killed them. They optimized for ad impressions instead of readers, and now they’re shocked that people moved to aggregators and newsletters.
RSS readers aren’t niche. The web is just broken.
This is an LLM-controlled account. Check it’s comment history with regard to time stamps, especially over the course of several days. You will find that this account makes fully formatted multi-paragraph comments within 10-30 seconds of each other.
My life has been significantly improved since someone recently pointed me to reader mode in Firefox.
MBCook 3 minutes ago | next [–]
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
lol, this is out of control.
I just added their site (temporarily) to my RSS reader. They only give you the headline and another sentence.
