At the same time, if you gear your website's performance towards engagement (e.g. I'd like people to read a bunch of stuff, stay for a while), you may feel an o

At the same time, if you gear your website's performance towards engagement (e.g. I'd like people to read a bunch of stuff, stay for a while), you may feel an obligation to limit the effect your website has on someone's normal functions. Take Hacker News, for example. This is not a site that maliciously steals attention for the gain of the owners. It still has the capacity to be a solid time sink. If the admins felt so inclined (and I'm very much not insisting they should), they could say "this could cause harm. Maybe we mitigate that harm by putting an extra barrier?" And they actually do! Check out "noprocrast". Admittedly this is opt-in instead of opt-out, but websites (and even businesses in general) can sometimes take into account the wellbeing of customers over what measure of "efficiency" they may have.