The New York Times today teases that "A Better Internet Is Waiting For Us" before hitting the reader with a 13MB page that takes 8.5 minutes to load on Hong Kong hotel wifi. 3 MB of this carnival of bloat is due to a single hero image of a painting that would compress beautifully 
The way most Americans' data plans work, this level of bloat means a few pennies are going to your mobile provider with each page load, and the article will earn millions for them in aggregate. This bloat tax could fund the entire publishing industry, with no need for advertising
In other words, we already have a perfectly functional micropayments infrastructure for online journalism, except it's configured in the worst way: giving the reader tracking, battery-shredding ads, slow page loads, total loss of privacy and sensationalist clickbait journalism
God gave web designers ten fingers so that one can be cut off each time they post a news article that is over a megabyte in size
Also, overriding the scroll event is like making a garage door opener that punches someone in the face. They don't want it, they aren't expecting it, and the behavior just slows them down and makes them hate you
I gave a nice one-megabyte talk on the website obesity crisis four years ago, which unfortunately continues to be relevant today: idlewords.com/talks/website_…
