The content of this article is fantastic and frightening.
However, viewing this page on mobile, you can’t help but appreciate the interactivity that feels as though it’s been designed with the mobile reader in mind. It’s marvelous.
I am sitting here on an upgraded Nexus 9 tablet with the latest Google Chrome. This thing came out less than 3 years ago and yet I literally cannot read this article. I wait ten seconds not touching the page for it to finish loading as fonts, banners, sounds all pop in and try to settle around me. Barely touching the screen to scroll it down causes a button to start sliding around the page, overlapping on top of a bunch of text telling me I can stop pushing the button any time. The roulette wheel animation in the background spins at 2fps while the motor in my fan spins at 7200rpm. Trying to touch the button causes the whole page to refresh. The page regresses to "Loading" on white while a banner ad and a pop-up self-congratulating the site for using cookies comes up. Another ten seconds to wait for my now baking sheet to cool down and I try sliding past the button while the music stutters, failing to play. The tab reloads again.
The only words I was able to read were the banner ad, the bit that tells me I can stop pushing the button, and "Loading". I think this is an apt metaphor for the modern web.
If by marvelous, you mean takes forever to load...starts rendering black text on a red background, background animations then pop in that distract me from reading the text, and oh great, what's this, inconsitent and involuntary sounds that load by default, several seconds after the page starts rendering and replay repeatedly based on where i scroll up or down in the article. I'd scroll and try to read and then "BAM" NEW-RANDOM-SOUND and animation! Shut up! I'm trying to read your god damned paragraph!
And now the animations are stuttering as I scroll...
Oh, and the horizontal-border between the text and the animation shifts up and down depending on where i am on the page (literally obscuring the text I was reading at one point).
Maybe i'm not the kind of person that poker machine sounds appeal to...
I literally can't even get it to work on my desktop setup :(
However, viewing this page on mobile, you can’t help but appreciate the interactivity that feels as though it’s been designed with the mobile reader in mind. It’s marvelous.