One of the things I find most annoying about a lot of modern — particularly ad-supported — content on the Web is how keen it is to interrupt you while you're in the middle of something.
I was looking at a site for some instructions on something or other earlier — I forget exactly what, since the experience ended up being more about the annoying factors than the actual content — and I was immediately interrupted by a cookie popup, which took me to a separate page where I couldn't read the article when I attempted to close it rather than clicking "accept". Once I went back, accepted the cookies and started reading the article, a video started playing at the top of the page. Then, after I'd stopped this, halfway through me reading the actual text, the page faded out and a sign "boinged" into place inviting me to subscribe to the site's mailing list. I closed the tab and looked for the information elsewhere.
This is an extreme example, but it seems to happen quite a bit, particularly with "advice" blogs and tech support sites. Elsewhere, we have things like Wikia's (sorry, "Fandom's") autoplaying videos, which not only are not affiliated directly with the wikis they appear on, but often get information wrong. (Look at the page for Ann Takamaki from Persona 5, for example; the video calls her "Ann Tensei", which is not a mistake someone maintaining a Shin Megami Tensei wiki would make!) Or one particular, specific annoyance, which is articles interrupting the flow of their own text with "You May Also Like…" links, sometimes before the writer has even gotten to the point. News sites (even ones one might typically believe to be "reputable") appear particularly prone to this, but I've seen some game sites do it too.
With all this in mind, it's no wonder that the average Internet user is assumed to have the attention span of a particularly hyperactive house fly. To me, it speaks volumes as to the lack of faith a site has in its content if it's already trying to direct people elsewhere even before the reader has finished looking at the thing they're currently looking at.
Maybe I'm just being an old fart, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to settle down to read something without being interrupted now and again!
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