I feel like I’ve must have been on sedatives for the past couple of years and its effects are wearing off. When and how have the websites got so annoying?

You load a website and it immediately displays a modal window asking you to insert your email address because you might want to receive some future news and that is before you even get a slightest chance to figure out whether the content is worth reading. Sometimes there is a delay of a couple of seconds (or detection that the cursor is not moving) so just when you have started reading the text it gets overlayed by the notification. Or this happens as soon as you move the cursor out of the window even though you are not done reading and maybe just wanted to quickly check something in a different tab.

It’s not a new thing but it seems to me that this practice has been spreading like a plague and I cannot pinpoint the time when it reached the current ridiculous level. Is it because I tend to visit particular sort of websites? I don’t think so; I’m interested in a range of unrelated topics so the sites I visit don’t necessarily have something in common.

“Cookie law”

Of course, annoying users voluntarily is not enough. Thanks to EU the content providers must display a notice that they set cookies or to some degree track users. Pretty much every provider uses some sort of analysis to figure out how their site performs which means that 99% of websites display a notice. Some are discretely at the bottom of the page, some are nuisances that cover part of the content, some go berserk and cover the entire page.

A few people read those notices while the rest mindlessly clicks on any button just to get rid of them (I admit I fall into the second group).

The result: Web browsing has become an endless stream of various notifications that one needs to dismiss and it’s pretty annoying.