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.

FOSS Dev Mar 12

@pheonix Legendary way to describe the issue: "The current state of the web assumes that the reader is an adversary to be trapped and monetized."

Thank you for sharing.

Windy city Mar 12

@sysedit Thank you for reading! 😊🙏

If someone with a deeper web engineering background or other technical understanding can chime in: Just thinking from a data-usage standpoint, why isn't the web doing graphics with vectors and procedural generated textures? They can already draw the text boundaries and image locations using frames, so adding these features seems inherently lower bit-per-pixel than JPEG/WEBM. Am I wrong?

@VictimOfSimony A lot of the most problematic weight isn't graphics, it's scripts and data being shunted between you, the website you want to read, and a load of 3rd parties.

Websites already *do* usually use vectors and CSS for most things where those are practical. Those elements are a tiny portion of the weight compared to scripts (and their dynamic data movement) and photographic images/video.

Bo Tally Mar 12

@pheonix Our Congress operates under the same framework. We hire expensive representatives who immediately pivot to nonstop fundraising demands as soon as they are seated.

calvin 🛋️ Mar 12

@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?

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.

Rupert Reynolds Mar 12

@pheonix It seems to me one answer is for more people to have their own websites, or even their own domains, and publish #disenshittified content, then others will link to them.

Old timers and historians will say I just 'reinvented' the 20th century web and webrings. I think we can do better than that, but it would be better than the current mess, yes?

Windy city Mar 13

@RupertReynolds I couldn't agree more! The indieweb movement and the concept of POSSE feels like a good escape hatch.

We might be reinventing 90s webrings, but this time we're armed with much better typographic standards, CSS Grid and protocols like RSS and activitypub. Owning your own DOM is the only way to guarantee your readers actually get a respectful UX. Love this perspective.

Rupert Reynolds Mar 13

@pheonix I started seeing things differently after reading Enshittification. I used to do my own things, sure, but the idea was new to me that an open internet was seen as an affront to every company that wanted to insert itself between me and the things I do (and charge both sides for the 'privilege'). Cory Doctorrow's book crystallised it all in my head. Freedom is a kind of rebellion.

Ketakater Mar 12

@pheonix honestly, I usuae avoid them. On the one hand for all the click baity shit and tracking, on the other hand for keeping sane amidst all those crazy shit going on in the world

I subscribe to a few news outlets here on Mastodon, such as @tagesschau, @tazgetroete and @heiseonline - and that's enough for me on a normal day.

I also subscribe to a printed weekly newspaper.

Windy city Mar 13

@Ketakater ngl that's a highly effective strategy for keeping your sanity! There is a beautiful irony that a printed weekly newspaper represents the ultimate 'zero cumulative layout shift' experience.

I honestly think more tech-literate folks are going to start adopting your exact media diet as the web gets noisier. Thanks for reading!

Dr Andrew A. Adams #FBPE 🔶Mar 12

@pheonix @pluralistic
Auto reader view for specific sites.
There's a plugin I would install.

Mark Whybird 4d ago

@a_cubed @pheonix @pluralistic There’s a built-in setting for that in Safari.

You can even just automatically have it on for any site that supports it.

@pheonix Re: the obsession with publisher-specific apps: apps can grab way more data than web browsers will let publishers have, and because it's a lot harder to get around adverts and paywalls in an app.

It also creates a soft lock-in of sorts, someone who's installed a news app will probably use that instead of going to other publishers, and they're less likely to forget about this specific publisher.

Higher retention and higher CTR due to less blocking are appealing to suits xP

Windy city Mar 13

@eishiya Aha good point! you hit the nail on the head.

As browsers like Safari and Firefox have started aggressively throttling third-party cookies and cross-site tracking, the publishers might be panicking. The only way for them to maintain deep, device-level telemetry and completely bypass ad-blockers is to force you into their native sandbox.

I might borrow your term 'soft lock-in' in the future. It makes total sense for the suits looking at avg revenue per user, even if it is hostile to the open web 😭

@pheonix Something else I hadn't considered that helps explain why these apps get made, perhaps even initially in good faith, is that many mobile users are reluctant to use web browsers. Their app store is the first place they look, rather than a web search engine. A publisher that doesn't want to miss those readers will therefore want to show up in the app store.

And then the "benefits" of a more publisher-controlled experience would make them want to direct their web users to the app too.

Robotistry Mar 13

@pheonix Long covid prevents me from being able to cope with them at all so my default move is to go the reader. I would say I miss the old web with all its handmade html, but I remember the blinking red and yellow scrolling banners and bright green backgrounds and don't miss them!

Windy city Mar 13

@robotistry I'm so sorry to hear you're dealing with long covid, but you highlight a crucial point here.

Accessibility is also about cognitive load. When the DOM is constantly shifting and prompting, it physically exhausts the user. Reader modes on browsers is a lifesaver for stripping out that bloat.

Jack Yan (甄爵恩)Mar 13

@pheonix Excellent analysis! We’ve been going the opposite way since the start of 2025—removing advertisers and networks who track at a cost to ourselves, but in the hope readers will choose to support us in other ways (e.g. buying our magazine in PDF form or as a hard copy). So far few have cared but I am doing it out of principle. We started publishing online in the 1990s.
We are not perfect as we use services that still have trackers but hopefully our pages aren’t as heavy as this.

Jack Yan (甄爵恩)Mar 13

@pheonix Examples:

https://lucire.com/2026/0306fe0.shtml
https://autocade.net/index.php/Maruti_Suzuki_Alto_(2012%E2%80%9323)

Unfortunately part of the first site is on WordPress and that must introduce a few things:

https://lucire.com/insider/20260309/bhavitha-mandava-named-chanels-newest-ambassador/

I’m not technical enough to know how to measure the loads but I really hope that by cutting out Google and a few regular culprits we’re leaner.

Lucire: Quintessential quality

Jack Yan interviews Caitlin McEachran, the designer behind Seam New York, discovering a well thought-out label that will never compromise on its values of quality and craftsmanship.

Windy city Mar 14

@jackyan I think that's a very noble strategy and it shows that you, as a publisher are also mindful about how readers experience the final product. Thanks for reading! 🙏

@pheonix The civilised way is never try to sell anyone anything unless you think they’ll willingly come back for more. So yeah, that principle is being increasingly violated and it’s especially problematic when no-one at all wants or has to follow it any more. That’s when the race to the bottom is complete. Enshittification.

srđan dvornik Mar 15

@pheonix I've thought my uBlock Origin and NoScript work just fine. since I'm completely ignorant about communication technology, it may be just an illusion

gene sophia bogolepov Mar 15

@pheonix it sometimes feels to me as if the whole world is shouting at me. thank you for your voice!

Windy city Mar 16

@the_bogolepov thank you!!

@pheonix I use a script blocker. News sites are often the worst offenders when it comes to presenting a completely unusable document on first page load, and 30+ domains other than the one serving the base document that want to run scripts. This is especially grievous if the content is a video clip from a broadcast television station. You have to guess which panel of the adware-newsware quilt operates the content you wanted, and which are adware and trackers. Enshittified web.

Windy city Mar 16

@log IKR. Such is the state of web these days..

@pheonix An interesting overlap here is with accessibility. Specifically screen reader accessibility is my angle, but cognative load is a real thing and curves differently, and any visual issues would become problematic with what you point out. But take screen readers. Assuming the article isn't paywalled, if we don't have an ad blocker, all those ad frames literally slow down navigation of the entire page, including arrowing through the text, the modals can be half visible and sometimes not actually in focus but disable interaction with the page, and those frames? Not a single ad frame in the history of ever has ever been accessible. They generate text that's marked as inserted over and over again, with image links who's alt text is a stream of easily hundreds of characters, the raw text of an add link. I saw one of those reach 900 characters. We don't even know what they're advertising And the user has to navigate *through* every one of these, there is no such thing as skimming. Sure, we could navigate by heading or something, but there's actual text below that frame without any markup besides not in the frame. NVDA, at least, provides a gesture that says exit current container from the bottom, so you should be able to get out of a frame that way, except there is a combination of nesting and chains going on. Without uBlock origin, most of the web is downright completely unusable. And on iOS? We just don't browse the web.

@pheonix Also, if you think the text shifting down a bit is bad and destroys spatial mapping? Try the reading cursor being thrown randomly about the page or up to the top every time one of those loads, because the sheer scope of the DOM refresh caused it to scramble and lose its place. Like if you were reading a book and kept getting randomly jumped back to the beginning of the chapter or somewhere 15 pages from where you are now.

LostSettler 6d ago

@pheonix those aren't news sites and that's not news. The first newspapers were fliers in coffee shops where financial traders would take trades. News is literally "information that helps you make better financial decisions". That is all.

What you describe is a system that stops you seeing anything: in order to what? Profit from you. The less you see, the better - on that site.

Philosophically, news as entertainment is similar - commodifies your attention. You are the product. Fuck that.

Sharp Cheddar Goblin 6d ago

@pheonix If I have to go through more than one hoop to read an article, I just close the tab.

Mark Whybird 4d ago

@pheonix Idiocracy didn’t quite take it far enough, but they were on the right track: https://aus.social/@whybird/116253380085403698

Mark Whybird (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Remember how we laughed at the TV screen 75% devoted to ad space in the pre-cumentary movie #Idiocracy? Well, check out this article “The 49MB Web Page” by @[email protected] at https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit, and also comments on it by @[email protected] at https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/your_frustration_is_the_product. Who’s laughing now? #web #webDesign, opposite of #SmallWeb

Aus.Social

@pheonix personally, I have zero tolerance for the abuse and consent violations of websites, as they burned through all my patience to the point that I not only ran out of spoons, but also forks and chopsticks and only have knifes remaining.

And the only winning move re: #Enshittification is to refuse to submit to it!

https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/116253403525011315

Kevin Karhan :verified: (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] yeah, the #Enshittification is fucking real… - I don't like #ReadyPlayerOne [becoming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpPE85Jogjw) #reality!

Infosec.Space

@pheonix #WhatsMissing is not just people refusing to do so, but to quid-pro-quo this shit with more aggressive #Contermeasures than ever before.

Literally using @torproject / #TorBrowser on highest safety settings and blocking all the #JavaScript #malware before it even gets loaded.
Cuz otherwise we'll see this abuse only get worse!

@pheonix Some folks claimed this #Enshittification is basically "brain rape" but I consider this a bad, distasteful comparison.

Tho I can see why people come to that conclusion...

silicon valley - brain rape

YouTube

Windy city 4d ago

@kkarhan that video ought to come with a TW cause wow, we're moving in that direction pretty fast.

@pheonix exactly!

Kevin Karhan :verified: (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] yeah, the #Enshittification is fucking real… - I don't like #ReadyPlayerOne [becoming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpPE85Jogjw) #reality!

Infosec.Space

@pheonix Thank you for this write-up! Similar trend as with CPU and RAM. We have a lot more compute nowadays, so let's spend it a lot less efficiently (ugh).

This made me wonder though, how much of this bloat disappears if you start paying? Do they still shove ads and autoplay videos in your face? (I don't have high hopes here)