I'm glad someone is finally pushing back on unskippable / dark-pattern ads. The "fake progress bar", tiny close buttons, and multi-ad chains are just hostile UX.
Small related thing. I built a tiny free + open-source Chrome extension ("Parsely") that lets you focus only on the content. No ad, No distraction.
I originally made it to avoid ad-heavy / attention-stealing pages when I'm reading something.
If this kind of "make the web slightly less annoying" tooling resonates, feedback/PRs welcome.
The pencil-in-hand approach forces active engagement. Your brain can't drift when it's hunting for things worth noting. And the "would I take notes on this?" test is a genuinely good filter. I used to do this in college. Somewhere along the way I stopped, probably when "reading" became "checking 47 tabs while pretending to work."
The printing step is where I fall off, though. There's enough friction there that I'd just... not read the thing.
Parsely is partly about reducing friction to zero—same tab, one keypress, you're in.
For me, the best system is the one I'll actually use. But you're pointing at something real. "tools that force active engagement beat passive consumption every time".
I'm tring to do this by making you deliberately advance through text. Printing and annotating does it even more forcefully. Different tools for different people, maybe different moments.
You just described my experience perfectly. the skim mode that kicks in automatically, eyes moving but brain disconnected, forcing yourself to restart only to drift again. It's exhausting.
The AI observation is interesting and I think you're onto something. We're training ourselves to scan for "the answer" buried in walls of text. It's efficient for extraction, terrible for actual reading. Different cognitive modes, and one is cannibalizing the other.
With ADHD-PI in the mix, I'd be really curious to hear if Parsely helps. The one-paragraph-at-a-time approach seems to work well for some ADHD folks, it removes the overwhelming "wall of text" feeling and gives your brain a smaller, more manageable target.
But brains are different, so no promises. Let me know how it goes either way. If it doesn't work for you, I'd genuinely want to understand why. I think it might help me and all the other people who suffers same thing make it better.
There's something to this, not all resistance is dysfunction.
Sometimes your brain is correctly telling you "this isn't worth it." But I'd push back a little.
The problem isn't always the writing. I've bounced off genuinely excellent long-form pieces—articles I later finished and found deeply valuable, simply because the environment triggered my escape reflex before the content had a chance.
It's like trying to enjoy a good meal in a casino. The food might be great, but everything around you is designed to pull your attention elsewhere. At some point, you stop blaming the chef.
That said, you're right that Parsely won't make bad writing good. If an article is hollow clickbait, reading it one paragraph at a time just reveals the emptiness more slowly. The tool helps me get to the content, what I do with bad content is still "close the tab."
Maybe the real answer is both [better filters for what deserves attention, and better environments for when something does].
On reader mode, Yes, I tried it. Reader mode is great for stripping visual noise, but it didn't solve my core problem. When a long article is visible all at once, the scrollbar still whispers "this much left to go", and my brain starts looking for an escape hatch. What I needed was seeing only one thought at a time(an intentional constraint).
On control groups, Fair point, I didn't run formal tests. But I could still read physical books. I just did it less and less, because my web reading habits were eroding my overall attention span. This is a personal story, not a scientific claim.
On you not needing this, I'm genuinely glad for you! Seriously. The ability to quickly triage an article and allocate the right cognitive effort. that's a skill I lost. Not everyone has the same problem. Some people need patches to quit smoking, others just put them down. Both are valid.
On "solving the real problem", Maybe it doesn't! The real problem might be the attention economy, platform incentives, or my own habits. Parsely is a symptom treatment(a bandage). But for me, that bandage let the wound heal. Sometimes that's enough. This isn't a universal solution. It's for people like me, people who know how to read but somehow lost the ability to do it.
Small related thing. I built a tiny free + open-source Chrome extension ("Parsely") that lets you focus only on the content. No ad, No distraction.
I originally made it to avoid ad-heavy / attention-stealing pages when I'm reading something.
If this kind of "make the web slightly less annoying" tooling resonates, feedback/PRs welcome.
Demo page: https://parsely.obasic.app Why we built this: https://parsely.obasic.app/story GitHub: https://github.com/TeamOliveCode/parsely