Daring Fireball: ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’:
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***ing article. If we wanted to watch videos, we’d be on YouTube. It’s like going to 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.
No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this. The print edition of The New Yorker could not possibly be more respectful of both the reader’s attention and the sanctity of the prose they publish. But read an article on their website and you get autoplaying videos interspersed between random paragraphs. And the videos have nothing to do with the article you’re reading. I mean, we should be so lucky if every website were as respectfully designed as The New Yorker’s, but even their website — comparatively speaking, one of the “good ones” — shows only a fraction of the respect for the reader that their print edition does.
This is why my primary use for chatbots is searching the web — getting the information I need without having to traverse ad after ad, video after video, popup after popup. The periodicals I value the most — the Economist, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement — I subscribe to in print. Print resists enshittification; the web embraces it.