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.

@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.