I've started using "why the internet sucks" as an indicator that the person writing may be more in love with a good rant than anything else. I don't think you

I've started using "why the internet sucks" as an indicator that the person writing may be more in love with a good rant than anything else. I don't think you can weigh the number of bytes you receive that are the message against the total weight of the page. Doesn't work like that. Facebook gives me a stream of people I know saying useless things. I consume maybe 4-5K of plaintext on it every day. Have any idea how much crap it pushes down the pipe? How much real-estate all the things I don't care about consume? A lot. Hell, the information isn't even that valuable. But still I consume it. It's way more complicated than the author makes out. If I wanted to know Abraham Lincoln's birthday and you put it in bold 48-point text in the center of the page, I'm spending 3 seconds reading it and I'm gone. The rest of the experience is just a waste of time and bytes on the part of the supplier. Who cares? ADD: It's not the crappy ads and social stuff that's the problem. It's sites using more and more techniques to subtly make you stick around. The subtle distractions, like a FB list of which friends also liked reading the particular article, or offering badges for participation, or tracking you across sites, that cause the most long-term trouble for folks. The big, glaring stuff is easy. People are used to that crap by now.