Have I become old or some websites are really crappy these days? I would not doubt myself so easily on something I am have been really good at: browsing the internet, if these websites didn’t belong to some of the most prominent media outlets which have dominated both the online and the offline world.
I click on an article shared on LinkedIn or Facebook (did I just hand in evidence that I am old?), I mean reddit, and bam! I land on a very nice looking article on a beautiful mobile friendly website. It starts with a colourful picture about the article followed by words in great typography. My pleasure only lasts about one minutes: the amount of time needed to read a few lines casually. I reach an ad that takes more screen real-estate than the featured image and the text together. As I scroll down to get to the rest of the article I just see more ads, one after the other and the ads just get weirder and weirder. At this point I am so invested in the amount of time I have spent wasted, that I keep scrolling and looking at useless ads. I just want to get to the bottom of it, literally.
Who moved my cheese? I scroll up and down and see no hint of a second paragraph. Finally, as I am exhausted and about to leave, I notice an arrow to the right of the featured image: it’s a slide show! The article is broken into many parts, each part with a picture, which isn’t worth a thousand words by any measure, and I have to visit each picture to read the text underneath it. This is the one exception to “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” philosophy.
This new slideshow design is like eating at a fancy restaurant where you have to eat all the seven courses to feel almost full, except in this case each course is only one ingredient: one is just a teaspoon of fat, the other, a few grains of salt. I can guess why they do it: some think it increases their click-rate, and others think it is a trendy new design. I like to call the former “the fool” and the latter “the fool who follows him“, respectively and respectfully.