> most users prefer the obnoxiousness

Most people aren’t looking to read the news- they’re bored and looking for entertainment. So they LOVE all this crap that autoplays, especially when it queues up more clickbaity crap that sounds more interesting than today’s headlines.

> people aren’t looking to X- they’re bored

Wow the way you put this brings so much into focus. All of these apps and websites with awful ux where you can't find anything because you're drowning in a sea of content and shit is constantly flashing in your face... that is the point. People actually want that, for no other reason than its entertainment and it distracts them from their boredom. They're not actually looking for news, or videos, or pictures, or to learn or anything, they're looking for entertainment. And it's not the content that is entraining them -- the content is just an excuse -- it's the app itself that's entertaining them.

News, social media, video sites, photo sites, they're not content platforms at all, they're just a new type of game. That also explains why I can't comprehend the behavior of these sites, because I'm coming to the site to do something completely different from what it was designed to do.

I think calling it entertainment is very flattering. I would call it distraction, or maybe even conditioned response.

Surrogate entertainment?

I think the word you are looking for is “diversion”.

No. I wrote the word I meant. There are numerous synonyms for distraction, and deliminating between them does not add anything to the discussion at hand.

Yes, I guess as a long time internet user it can be quite easy to forget that most of the world is still offline, and as more and more people are exposed to the web for the first time, there are masses of naieve eyeballs to exploit, they've yet to acclimatise and grow protective barrier that is aware of the very real possibility that websites you visit are trying to manipulate you.

I wonder what the web will be like after the internet is done spreading and the only new users are young ones... perhaps websites will start behaving more respectfully out of necessity despite any lack of moral standards.

I would say users don’t have a choice. Knowing you can install a blocker as well as how to go about it is a high hurdle.

Just like installing a pop-up blocker in the early 2000s.

So they put up with it. Because it’s the only way to read the article they want on the local TV news site. And they are more about the news about their kid’s school than the weather guy pop-up.

I’m not sure what your sources are, but “most users” sounds incorrect. All of this stems from personal experience and is anedoctal, so I’ll leave it at that.

> But I guess the metrics must show or are being interpreted to show that most users prefer the obnoxiousness

I thought all the autoplaying video was because video ads pay more? It doesn't matter to the site if anyone actually watches the videos or not, as long as they count as an ad view and they get paid.

This is probably due to the atrocious state of causal inference in tracking within the digital industry generally.