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PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading

There’s not much worth quoting in this PC Gamer article but I do want to draw your attention to three things.

First, what you see when you navigate to the page: a notification popup, a newsletter popup that obscures the article, and a dimmed background with at least five visible ads.

Welcome Mat
Welcome Mat

Second, once you get passed the welcome mat: yes, five ads, a title and a subtitle.

A bit of article
A bit of article

Third, this is a whopping 37MB webpage on initial load. But that’s not the worst part. In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads.

Bandwidth bonanza
Bandwidth bonanza

We’re lucky to have so many good RSS readers that cut through this nonsense. 1