'Your Frustration Is the Product'

Source: Hacker News

Wednesday, 18 March 2026

Shubham Bose, “The 49 MB Web Page”:

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an ad‑blocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

It is the same story across top publishers today.

A Devastating Deconstruction

Bose’s essay paints a bleak picture of the modern news web. He begins with The New York Times, then moves on to The Guardian, whose mobile layout can leave as little as 11 percent of the screen for article content—just four lines of text.

Viewability and time‑on‑page are very important metrics these days. Every hostile UX decision originates from this single fact. The longer you’re trapped on the page, the higher the CPM the publisher can charge. Your frustration is the product. No wonder engineers and designers make every UX decision that optimizes for that. And you, the reader, are forced to interact, wait, click, scroll multiple times because of this optimization. Not only is it a step in the wrong direction, it is adversarial by design.

The reader is not respected enough by the software. The publisher is held hostage by an auction‑based incentive system that encourages—and rewards—dark patterns.

Personal Observations

• I have been testing the MacBook Neo in a near‑default state, avoiding content‑blocking extensions. Even without blockers, many ad‑laden sites feel “almost beyond parody.”
• With uBlock Origin Lite in Safari (App Store link), I still encounter:
  • Newsletter subscription prompts and unrelated article links every few paragraphs.
  • Autoplay videos that interrupt reading flow, turning a simple article into a series of pop‑ups.
  • Repeating the same ad multiple times within a single piece (e.g., Apple News often shows the same ad six‑to‑eight times).

Print vs. Digital

No print publication employs these tactics. The print editions of The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker respect the reader’s attention. Yet their websites:

• Intermix autoplay videos unrelated to the article (e.g., The New Yorker).
• Overlay “apps” or download prompts that actively interfere with reading.

The Vicious Cycle

• User fatigue: People spend less time on the web because sites become increasingly hostile.
• Publisher response: To combat declining engagement, publishers add more reader‑hostile elements, driving users away further.
• Analogy: The Guardian’s 11 percent content view is like a TV channel that shows only seven minutes of programming per hour and fills the rest with commercials—unsustainable for any audience.

The Underlying Problem

The highest‑profile decision makers for these sites often dislike the medium they manage. As Bose notes:

“A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.”

These decisions are made by people who “literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web,” yet they run large‑scale news platforms—akin to ocean‑liner captains deliberately steering toward icebergs.