The X That Doesn't Work (On Purpose)

A meme showed up on my Mastodon feed the other day — sjvn posted it publicly — and it stopped me mid-scroll. It's a size comparison: proton, neutron, electron... and then, smaller than all of them, the close-ad-button. Size Comparison: Proton, Neutron, Electron, and then the Close-Ad-Button via @sjvn@mastodon.social (not sure who the artist is) It's a joke. It's also a field guide to modern advertising UX.A quick disclosure before I get into it: I run AdGuard Home at the network level and browser-based blockers on top of that — you can read more about the setup in the homeserver series. I'm not a neutral observer here. I actively block ads, and I do it because of decades of exactly the kind of abuse I'm about to describe — dark patterns baked into the user experience by design, and increasingly, ads themselves becoming a legitimate malware vector. Some people argue a non-abusive ad ecosystem is theoretically possible, and maybe they're right in the abstract. But corporate greed and…