“Your frustration is the product”

Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not truly relevant to the story)

News sites are almost like lyric sites or recipe sites in this regard. The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit.

? Where is this true?

I pay for the NY Times. Logged in to my subscriber account, the front page is 68MB and has a giant Hume band ad filling 1/3 of the screen. Loading an article that contains about 9 paragraphs of text and I have a huge BestBuy banner ad filling the top, and then smaller banner ads interspersed between every paragraph.

That maybe 10KB of text is surrounded by 10MB of extraneous filler downloaded for just this page (not even including the cached content).

This isn’t true of the US:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

With fits and starts, real median wages have been on a solid upward trend since the mid-1990’s.

Computers were invented, and initially used for calculations, punch cards, databases, spreadsheets, automating warehouses and running airlines and stuff. Computers are really good for that stuff, like many orders of magnitude better than analog alternatives.

Later, computers became a mass market consumer product, and we had the web and internet, and moving everything online became a fad, much like AI is a fad now. This pushed computers into some fairly marginal use cases, like "social media", publishing, messaging, e-commerce, and CRUD apps to manage workflows like JIRA and friends. Computers are kind of ok for this stuff... but, frankly, not that much better than the original thing. Like, a telephone, fax, etc. already allowed instant communication, email is maybe a bit better than fax, but it's not 1000x better. JIRA is a bit better than a whiteboard and post-it notes, but, also probably not 1000x better.

It's these recent, marginal-ish use cases that are getting destroyed by enshittification, AI, etc... because they were just never that good an application for computers and UIs in the first place. I think, if one wants to work on, or use an application that doesn't get filled with ads or have a copilot gratuitously inserted or whatever, it's probably more likely to happen in software for fluid dynamics or some natural fit for using a computer. Conversely, anything like facebook or jira or whatever that never really needed to be a computer app apart from because it was fashionable... is now unfashionable.

This is kind of an ironic comment given that this whole discussion is about visiting the sites as a paying subscriber.

I pay for the NYT. If I visit without adblockers, the site is absolutely stuffed with obnoxious amounts of advertising. I mean, of course I use adblockers normally, and it's basically a requirement no matter how much you're willing to pay for every product you use.

Because everyone wants to double (and triple- and quadruple- and...) dip. Buy a $2000 TV and you'll likely discover ads on the homescreen, ContentID to sell your viewing habits, etc. They figured "why not?" because someone will always rationalize it.