from Hacker News

Trying to send a sticker in Steam Chat burned through a month of mobile data

by danso on 7/18/25, 7:44 PM with 88 comments

• by Fogest on 7/18/25, 9:37 PM

  The huge amount of data steam used on the store that people are pointing out in the reddit comments makes me wonder if this is why I am having so many problems on their store. For the last half year or so I have found that Steam store pages load very slow for me. It feels like I am loading in their pages on dial-up. I have been suspecting it could be my ISP throttling the Steam connection, but no other download/streaming service or anything seems to have this same problem. And going on a VPN or different browser doesn't resolve the problem.

  I wonder if the issue is simply that it is loading a ton of data and my connection just isn't fast enough. Time to monitor the network traffic while browsing Steam I guess.

• by ThatMedicIsASpy on 7/18/25, 9:00 PM

  They were browsing the point shop. On Desktop (FF ctrlF5) this page loads 20-30MB of data. A mix of gif webm and animated pngs

  https://store.steampowered.com/points/shop

• by msgodel on 7/18/25, 9:03 PM

  Steam has always been a pig with data.

  When I used to live with my parents I specifically bought the physical Orange box so I could play portal and half life without having to download anything over the horribly slow and metered satellite connection.

  Steam immediately forced a multi-day process of downloading and updating steam, then downloading and updating portal, before I was able to launch the game and have it crash from broken GMA950 drivers.

  I buy maybe one game a year these days but I always buy it from GOG pretty much because of that experience.

• by LorenDB on 7/18/25, 9:44 PM

  Why are ISPs apparently limiting some plans to just 1 GB of data? That's not nearly enough for 2025.

• by ars on 7/18/25, 10:56 PM

  The big companies really don't seem to care about low bandwidth users.

  I attempted to use Teams website once over a very low speed hotspot. It utterly failed. It just kept reloading the same resource over and over and over, maybe it didn't wait long enough? Not sure. But it never worked.

  I then tried the teams app, and that was no better. It would get stuck on the main screen and couldn't go any further.

  So then I tried outlook, desktop client. Total fail there as well, it couldn't seem to manage to download a couple emails.

  I finally resorted to ssh and using a command line.

  I feel like a old man screaming get off my lawn, but it really seems like the new programmers need to use old computers for a while and learn how to be more efficient.

• by micromacrofoot on 7/18/25, 10:13 PM

  Steam has an enormous amount of headway, and I'm a massive fan of what they've done... but they're going to lose ground with their laissez-faire development practices, I run into random issues like this all the time with the store.

• by autoexec on 7/18/25, 10:11 PM

  what is the point of a digital sticker? What are you supposed to stick it to?

• by dsizzle on 7/18/25, 8:53 PM

  fwiw the substack app did this to me too

• by leshokunin on 7/18/25, 10:46 PM

  Would you say you were delighted?

• by sitzkrieg on 7/19/25, 4:35 AM

  steam, like every other program that switched to web based uis are simply flat out worse in every way. even browsing the old store in cef was lightyears ahead

• by smittywerben on 7/18/25, 8:48 PM

  For context, Steam has never really supported mobile devices for using the Steam store. It kind of makes sense if you think about it.