The site is ~~wrong~~ somewhat correct about how big reddits homepage is.

~~It seems to not run any scripts when testing, so 1.5MB is the basic JS + CSS.~~

In reality, it's much, much worse. (On a desktop)

Even with an adblocker, reddit.com downloaded 18MB in the first 10 seconds. That would put that cost at over $1.

I stopped after that because it seemed to be just continuously downloading... something.

I know Reddit is quite media driven these days, but it seems to be unnecessary prefetching a lot

Edit: Looks like I was testing the desktop version, see jefftk's reply.

However, it doesn't help reddit's case that much. After looking into what it's actually downloading in my "desktop" test, there are lots of huge PNG images (1000x1000 +) that seem to be displayed as tiny thumbnails.

And for an infinitely scrolling page, it prefetches all the images in the feed at full resolution.

If I turn off my adblocker, I get an autoplaying amazon ad (~5MB).

Additionally, it starts auto-playing a livestreams which is just below the fold.