The Infinite Scroll
11th March 2020
This is an awful lot of work to read a few hundred words about how the Mets are—I am not spoiling anything here—currently being cheap and lazy and unaccountable and weird in the same ways that they’ve been for the last couple of decades. It is also the utterly normal experience of visiting a great many pages on the internet.
There are a few sites that look and work better—the ones that people pay for, generally, or ones built with the luxurious snowdrift margins of Medium—but mostly there are sites like this one and others that are even worse.
Even on the websites of august institutions ads interrupt the text every two paragraphs; ads follow you down the sides of the page like store security; ads pop up in boxes that resist being closed, the elusive little x evading your cursor.
The Safari browser has a feature called Reader that can get around a lot of this. But not everywhere.
In the last half-decade, ads have rapidly migrated from the sides and top of the page into the actual text. This is the result of pressures created by the transition from desktop computers to mobile devices. The ads need to get seen on a screen with no margins.
The ads that stalk you down the page reflect advertisers’ demands that their ads remain “in view.” And all the clammy unbidden video stuff is exactly as desperate as it looks. Not many people will watch video ads if given any choice in the matter. Taking choice out of the equation helps a lot.
Some sites have deliberately made the experience of reading them for free more assaultive, in order to bully readers into buying subscriptions. For the price of a small monthly indulgence on your end, it can all go back to normal and your laptop’s fan can finally turn off.
Or, you can just not read these sites. That’s my solution.