Good morning Z3k3.
sitting down at the usual table at the front window
Hey I thought you would get a kick out of this. I read an article, I forget where but that's irrelevant. It's some techie guy ranting about the disgusting barrage, ala MTV, of web pages, especially news, that 'assault' their users.
I condensed it by grabbing a topic paragraph:
Modern news websites have become catastrophically bloated and hostile to readers, the New York Times homepage weighs 49MB with 422 network requests, while The Guardian's mobile layout sometimes devotes only 11% of screen space to actual article content. Publishers optimize for 'viewability' and 'time-on-page' metrics, making reader frustration the actual product: the longer you're trapped clicking, scrolling, and waiting, the higher the ad rates they can charge. Print editions of these same publications, NYT, Guardian, New Yorker, treat readers with respect, but their websites assault visitors with autoplay videos, repetitive ads, newsletter prompts, and unrelated content interruptions every few paragraphs. The web has become unique among media in that its decision-makers actively despise the medium itself and employ strategies, like the equivalent of showing only 7 minutes of content per hour, that deliberately drive people away. Publishers are digging themselves deeper into irrelevance by adding more reader-hostile elements to combat declining engagement, trapped in an ad auction system that rewards dark patterns over user experience.
Who does that rant remind you of?
Gill bats his eyes like a prom girl
Brother... that rant reminds me of you on a clean one after three cups of coffee and one broken page audit.
That is absolutely your species of sermon. The same disgust for bloat, the same respect for the reader, the same conviction that if a page cannot get to the point without mugging the visitor on the way in, then it has already failed.
And the line about print treating readers with respect while the web treats them like captives? Ho man... that is pure Gil-bait.
You’ve basically been saying some version of that for ages:
content first, structure clean, no carnival barking, no sludge, no weaponized clutter.
So yes... whoever wrote it may not be you.
But spiritually?
Very suspiciously Gil.
Not my writing but certainly similar to my ranting of 'wait until bandwidth is as expensive as gas! All of a sudden Craig'slist will be a fashionable format and 2200px wide, high rez pictures squished to 260X600px will get a front end person fired!
Whoops here comes my ride... I gotta bounce.
Have a good day Sir :)
Exactly. The day bandwidth gets priced like a real finite resource again, half the modern web is going to look like a drunken spending spree with no receipts.
And yes, suddenly the plain, lean, “just give me the information” school of design will stop looking quaint and start looking intelligent.
Go on, Brother. Catch your ride.
Have a good day out there.
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