Yes, I admit it. I’m one of these too.

And so are you, and so is everybody else I know.

I’m talking about people who actually use the Web to read what they want, read JUST what they want, and not bother to give crapitalism its pound of flesh (or hour of eyeball time).

Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online, reveals research.

The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online.

Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.

Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention.

Well, this is kind of a “no DUH”-er. Of course we don’t want to sit through a promo spot, you crapitalist techno-dumbasses. When the commercials are on TV, we go pee. When they’re taking up space in our caches while we’re waiting for what we REALLY came to see, we go through the fucking ROOF! We don’t ooh and ahh over the cleverness of the dancing doodads, unless we are knuckle-dragging Missing Links. We do whatever it takes not to be inundated with dumb distractions, and we consider it user-friendly NOT to have whackloads of memory-hogging widgets dancing before our eyes (and making our not-constantly-updated browsers crash).

Of course, it’s the language that all this common sense is couched in here that makes me a fine laughing cheena. We are “selfish” and “ruthless” and “hot potato driven”. As opposed to how I would put it: efficient, commonsensical, goal-oriented, unwilling to waste time (and/or money) on extraneous crapola.

Charmed.

Say, dear reader, does this remind you of the Great Click-Through Disappointment that heralded the Dot-Com Bust just before the turn of the century? It does me. Back then, apparently, we were supposed to be so enticed by the dancing ad banners at the tops of web pages that we’d forget what we came to read–be it news, poetry, tips on housetraining our pets–and click through to buy whatever was being sold. The site hosting the ad would receive mere pennies (or fractions of pennies) per click. Meanwhile, it was the site that proffered all kinds of goodies that really cleaned up saleswise, assuming they weren’t selling what everyone else was, in which case they got eaten up or crushed by the competition.

It seemed to me then, and still does now, more than ever, a bad way to make a buck. Frankly, the number of independent hits I get on this page would not defray web-hosting expenses for me even if every single one of my small but loyal readership clicked through. That’s why you don’t see any blog-ads here. Well, that and I just plain hate them. They crash browsers, they clutter the picture, and I really don’t want to see pro-war t-shirts advertised on this very anti-war site, ‘kay?

And then there’s the fact that I just plain hate ads. I’ve gone off TV and magazines over them. I go to the Internets to escape all that.

I guess that makes me a grade-A bitch. Sure, crapitalists have to eat too, but I don’t give a rat’s ass. If they wanna know how to eat, I’ll tell them how to grow their own organic heirloom tomatoes and chard. I’ll even tell them how it’s done for free, out of the goodness of my heart. But they heavy lifting, especially the spadework and manure shovelling, they will just have to do for themselves. This site is my servant, not theirs.