The web starts on page four
The web is now a user hostile place to be. There are dark patterns, clickbait headlines, taboola churn, autoplaying never ending videos, ads that track you, cover content, distract you and occasionally try to force malware onto you.<p>I pity anyone who&#x27;s using accessibility tools to help us the web as sites often have a timer before they cover the content with a nag to sign up to their newsletter or they track your mouse and display something else because they don&#x27;t want you to leave.<p>I recently was inspired by a hacker news article to try using the web without an adblocker. Holy hell. It&#x27;s almost unusable. I made a video where I recorded this on my PC, I&#x27;m going to do the same on my phone. I had no idea it was this bad.<p>In contrast, the BBC website still seems pretty usable because they don&#x27;t need to run ads (at least when you&#x27;re accessing from the UK). They do, however, have the utterly ridiculous concept of having autoplay on by default so if you&#x27;ve clicked to watch a video about a current event, if you don&#x27;t click &#x27;cancel&#x27; in 5 seconds they&#x27;ll load you another video about something else (seemingly at random) when there is no reason to do so at all.<p>The web reminds me of the state of movie and music piracy before Netflix etc. In those days you bought a DVD and were forced to sit through an unskippable FBI warning and in some cases unskippable trailers, whereas if you pirated the movie you got a superior product. You got a copy of the movie that let you watch it on any device, let you make backups and didn&#x27;t punish you by forcing you to stare at unskippable content.<p>If you were a music pirate then you didn&#x27;t need to worry about Sony putting malware onto CDs that installed rootkits in your pc.<p>Software pirates didn&#x27;t need to worry about similar rootkits that made the game run slower than the pirated version or generally buggered up your computer.<p>We&#x27;ve reached this state with the web. I am forced to use an ad blocker for my security and sanity. Most adverts are lies, scams and are too damn distracting.<p>This isn&#x27;t the vision that Tim Berners-Lee had.<p>Look at this: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lite.cnn.com&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lite.cnn.com&#x2F;en</a><p>See how fast it is? See how well it runs on any old device you may have? I&#x27;d rather have this than the current web. Surely there&#x27;s an in between compromise somewhere.