Why we are never alone on the internet again
It is a sunny morning when you decide to read an article. A simple desire, so it seems. You open the browser, type in the URL, or click on a link that someone sent you: someone you trust, who said: "You have to read this." But as soon as the page has loaded, the fight against the algorithms of attention begins. You are no longer a reader. You are a resource.
Experts agree: a close button nowadays is often only a short breathing space before the next demand. Anyone who believes they can find peace with a click on the "X" has reckoned without the 5-second interval timer. Because the modern web has understood: he who waits, wins. And websites wait very patiently.
The modern news site is an ecosystem of expectations: your attention is the currency, your email address is the gold, your cookie profile is the oil of the 21st century. And as with real oil: it never really belongs to you, even if it originates from you.
And so you scroll further, hopeful that the actual article still exists somewhere beneath the ads, overlays, and newsletter prompts. It does. Mostly. Between the third and fourth ad banner, below the "Read more" recommendations, just above the automatically playing video that you did not open.
"The human brain hardly distinguishes between click reflex and reading intention anymore."
(Prof. Dr. A. Dblock, Institute for Digital Sensory Overload, Mannheim)
Yet the phenomenon is not new. Already in the early 2000s, the first news portals experimented with pop-up windows: small, harmless rectangles that you could click away without losing your dignity. What followed was an evolutionary arms race: browsers developed blockers, websites developed blocker detectors, and somewhere in between the user lost their reading flow, and sometimes also the will for information altogether.
Today the art has refined itself. It is called "User Experience", although the experience of the user consists of being systematically distracted from their goal. Dark Patterns, that is the name of the small design tricks that ensure that the "Decline" button is gray and tiny, while "Accept all" shines in brilliant red. As if the traffic light knew only one color, and that would always be in the interest of the advertising industry.
Particularly popular is the so-called "guilt trip strategy": anyone who does not want to subscribe to the newsletter clicks on "No thanks, I do not like good content." Anyone who rejects cookies reads: "You are deciding against an optimal experience." Anyone who closes the window without donating is reminded that somewhere an editor can no longer feed their family. The goal is clear: not information, but capitulation. And exhausted people capitulate quickly.
What remains at the end of this digital obstacle course? A study by the University of Dortmund (which we do not link because the click brings us nothing) shows that the average user on a news website spends more time closing overlays than reading texts. Specifically: 68 seconds of reading, 71 seconds of clicking away. We call that "engagement" in the industry.
And yet we return. Every morning, with the phone in hand, even before the first coffee is ready. We scroll through headlines that are meant to scare us, through offers that we do not need, through opinions that make us angry, because anger clicks. Sadness clicks. Outrage clicks. Curiosity clicks. Everything clicks, except satisfaction. That, unfortunately, does not click.
"Satisfied users generate hardly any advertising revenue."
(Anonymous source from Silicon Valley, not named by name out of fear for their job)
Perhaps that is the actual message that can be read between all the banners if you look long enough: the internet, as it exists today, is not a place for reading. It is a place for reacting. For consuming. For lingering, but never coming to rest. And somewhere on a server in Ireland, an algorithm is currently saving that you have read this sentence to the end. That is now part of your profile.
Good morning.
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