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Click, click, click, click … just one second … click, click, click … almost there. I’m trying to read an article to determine if it’s worth summarizing clearly and with a dose of pithy hilarity, but that’s not as easy as it used to be. I don’t mean the synthesizing, summarizing, and sharing. (Give me 16 ounces of coffee with a double-espresso depth charge, and I can still bring ChatGPT to its knees.) I mean the reading. It takes me more and more clicks to get through the overlays, ads, subscription boxes, and pop-ups just to read the lede. And that doesn’t even account for the time spent waiting for the scripts, cookies, and other trackers that are loaded onto my browser as soon as I land on a page—which sure feels like yet another punishment for agreeing to buy what the site is selling. It used to be that the customer was always right. When it comes to browsing news sites, the customer is always ripe. I’ve had better brand interactions with that Nigerian prince who used to email and ask for money.
Yes, as someone who obsessively reads a lot of articles across a lot of sites, it’s fair to say that I’m Patient Zero when it comes to this problem. But I’m hardly alone. A sad irony of this trend is that the more news sites struggle to get visitors, the more compelled they feel to suck every last drop of cash (and dignity) from those who make it through the commercialized maze. Another irony is that the worse the website reading experience gets, the more likely people are to settle for the AI summary version (the latest threat to a news industry already on life support). There are other ironies as well. It turns out irony is the last thing you can see on the internet without having to close seventeen boxes first. As my fellow old-school blogger John Gruber explains: “The web is the only medium the world has ever seen where its highest-profile decision makers are people who despise the medium and are trying to drive people away from it.” ‘Your Frustration Is the Product.’ “And the f-cking autoplay videos, jesus. You read two paragraphs and there’s a box that interrupts you. You read another two paragraphs and there’s another interruption. All the way until the end of the article. We’re visiting their website to read a f-cking article. If we wanted to watch videos, we’d be on YouTube. It’s like going to a restaurant, ordering a cheeseburger, and they send a marching band to your table to play trumpets right in your ear and squirt you with a water pistol while trying to sell you towels.'”
+ Shubham Bose: The 49MB Web Page. “I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data … To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let’s quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load.”
