Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
This is a good an informative essay.<p>However, there&#x27;s another element of &quot;user-hostile&quot; that I didn&#x27;t see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user.<p>It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form.  That itself is hostile to some people.  Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly).  But many of the providers of &quot;content&quot; know they have little to provide, so they drag it out in video form, saving the actual information for the last 10% of the video (if ever!)  This I find incredibly hostile, and it makes me eventually abandon that source as a matter of principle.  Then there are javascript-jacked sites, sites that are unbearably slow and clunky because of a mix of javascript&#x2F;ads.  I won&#x27;t mention any specific sites, but I stopped reading one similar to Mired.com long ago for that reason.<p>This problem isn&#x27;t just limited to the web though.  If you&#x27;re unfortunate enough to see modern television (or movies, for that matter), it&#x27;s clear that the amount of content has gone down, the noise has gone up, and the efforts to lock the audience in have increased.<p>There are some people who advocate avoiding all news and media.  I think it&#x27;s a bit extreme, but it may be more beneficial than harmful.