Engagement-focussed platforms and publications are of course trying to sign up as many people as possible using dark patterns and other annoyances to make peopl

Engagement-focussed platforms and publications are of course trying to sign up as many people as possible using dark patterns and other annoyances to make people subscribe to their services to be spared from all the bullshit. I'm not surprised: They actually provide useful services for free and the bigger the audience the higher their revenue from advertising. Over the next few years content on the Internet will go the same route as music and video: It's free if you endure the ads and there's one subscription for a majority of the publications with each getting their share. However, what the author describes isn't "the web". The web is about 2 billion web pages with just a couple of percent of them being actively maintained. I'd be willing to get that just a tiny minority of these pages are actually serving the annoyances this post highlights. We've seen the abuse of new technologies come and go, people just don't think about what they're building, they simply use what's available: Blinking text, text with drop shadows, Comic Sans, pages full of GIFs, pages built with tables, iframes, pop-ups, link-hijacking ads, Flash-ads, embedded Java code - the web was never the clean and organized place make it out to be. Never. It's a romanticised notion that just doesn't die. It's the same rethoric as when people claim that life was easier at some point in the past. It's all about finding common ground on what's necessary and what isn't and it usually starts with a couple of independent publishers trying out something new and the big players following their lead. HTML5 video killed Flash and Silverlight with WebGL/Javascript & modern CSS features being the last nails in their coffins. The web isn't just a couple of hundred big players and we will probably survive annoying push notification requests, overly complex Javascript and EU-mandated cookie opt-in hints. We will have to live with me stuff being abused for a while until browser vendors device that it's gotten annoying enough to do something about it. I wouldn't be too surprised if we find that all browser vendors decide that they'll disable cookie support in their browsers with a clear prompt to allow 1st party cookies globally only to then do some local machine learning magic to click all custom cookie acceptance dialogues without user interaction or something similar. Of course we'll then have to endure our browsers asking for permission to access Bluetooth devices in our vicinity or to run advertisements disguised as tiny WebAssembly programs. But even that will sort itself out as some point. The web has always been user hostile and that won't change. The level of hostility however, will.