The Internet Doesn't Want Readers. It Wants Livestock.

Gareth's been in a mood all week. Turns out it started with a hosting bill. Not his own, mind. He doesn't have a website. Gareth thinks websites are for people who've run out of pub to shout in. But he heard about someone switching platforms, and it set him off on one of his tangents, the kind that starts with "you know what really gets me" and ends forty minutes later with him accusing a cookie banner of moral cowardice. Apparently someone had moved from a platform that wanted to squeeze money out of their audience to one that just let them publish words on a page, and Gareth treated this as evidence that civilisation might not be completely dead after all. So here's Gareth, unedited, more or less. They Don't Want Readers. They Want Leads."Right," he says, "so you go onto a website. Doesn't matter what for. Recipe. News story. Some bloke's opinion on lawnmowers. And before you've read a single word, there's a pop-up. Subscribe to our newsletter. Then a cookie banner the size of a…