Windy cityMar 12

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.

Show threadRachel Barker

@pheonix Good article! One thing I will say is that I don't like the thing where pages have header bars which disappear on scroll-down and reappear on scroll-up.

Often I'll scroll a page to put the start of the the paragraph I'm reading right at the top of the screen. But that's almost impossible to do if, instead of just making a small adjustment, the up/down arrow keys also summon/dismiss a giant header bar. Much prefer websites which keep it simple and leave the header at the top of the page, where I can find it if and when I want it.

Mar 24 at 9:12amWeb