Mastodawn

The current state of the web assumes that the reader is an adversary to be trapped and monetized.

When a news website forces you through three dismissive actions just to read a headline, they are burning your cognitive budget before delivering any value. You are greeted by a cookie banner taking up the bottom 30% of your screen, a "Subscribe!" modal dead center, an autoplaying video pinned to the corner and a prompt begging to send you push notifications.

I wrote about the state of news websites. Would love to hear your thoughts✨🙏

https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit

#enshittification #darkpattern #web #technology #socialmedia #indieweb #ux #privacy

The 49MB Web Page

A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.

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calvin 🛋️

@pheonix There really ought to be some kind of organization that rates/certifies a website's useability. Something like a Better Business Bureau or whatever. That way these trash websites can get jeered into doing better, and good websites can show off their friendliness.

I don't really know if that would work, but these things exist in other domains, right?

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Windy city Mar 13

@calvin This is a really interesting idea. IIRC in theory, Google's core web vitals was supposed to be exactly this.

They promised to penalize sites with bad UX in their search rankings. Yet, the irony is that Google's own ad scripts are usually the primary offenders destroying those usability scores on news sites! An independent, non-profit like this could hold these platforms accountable.