I guess one possible avenue of thought is that when I opened the linked article, I had a few seconds to start reading before I got one full screen modal dialog, followed by another 1/5th height popup dialog on top of that to click away.

Not that most websites are any better. My favourites are basically the ones that just show a default "sorry but this content is blocked in your region" text.

Just now I opened a medium site and before I could even start reading I was hit with a popup to download the mobile app, some other popup that I ignored (cookies I guess), and within a second or two, a full screen modal asking me to subscribe. Often I also get a pay wall. All within seconds of opening the site. If that’s not hostile, I don’t know what is.

Needless to say, I closed the tab. No content is worth dealing with that over.

Sure plenty of other sites do it too but “other people do it” doesn’t mean it’s not hostile nor does it excuse the behavior. Medium is and has always been one of my most hated sites because a lot of tech people post there, a lot of medium links are submitted to HN, yet it’s a horrible place for the reader.

I'm pretty sure you know what "hostile" means in this context — and what has happened to Twitter after Elon bought it.

Probably the most annoying thing on the web lately is Cloudflare and all the "mysteriously verifying that you're a real human" junk.

Probably the second most annoying thing on the web today is when you click a link that looks interesting but the page you land on almost immediately says you have to do or pay something to actually read the thing the referring page implied. I don't even start reading a Medium article now if I can see that pop-up below - it's just an instinctive reaction to close the tab. I wish people wouldn't link to articles in walled gardens and search engines would remove those articles from their index - or if that's not reliable then exclude entire sites. Those walls break the whole cross-linking model that made the web the success it is and they waste people's time on a global scale.

I recognise that my position may be somewhat hypocritical because I'd rank AI slop as #3 and maybe #1 and #2 are making some kind of attempt to avoid supporting AI slop. But then I'd propose a more draconian solution to that problem as well - one involving punitive penalties for AI companies that scrape others' content without permission to train their models and possibly for anyone else using models that are tainted.