Technology

Right; that's actually what I was trying to say, just phrased differently. The majority of sites that prompt for cookie selection do so because they use the cookies for ad targeting, not for critical function of the actual site. They need to do that because it's the only way for them to monetize, in most cases: by selling targeted advertisements.

Prior to the GDPR, this would just happen without the enduser's consent. Now it's prompted on every site, which is an annoyance. From an enduser's perspective, it's destroying the web. From the host's perspective, using those cookies is the only thing keeping their lights on and creators paid (unless they've somehow managed to actually implement a successful subscription model, which is rare; so they often do both, like Wired here).

I'm glad that the GDPR rolled out for dozens of reasons. It's a net positive. It's undeniably also a pain in the ass for web UX, though, because now users need to deal with these crappy dialogs on each new site they visit. Which encourages users to avoid new sites, which also has a bad downstream effect on getting the web back to the glory days of thousands of independent and useful sites versus a small collection of giant corporation sites.

I think a decent solution would be for standardizing these kind of opt-in dialogs into browser settings, somehow, to automatically bypass them based on user profile preferences. That's not a simple effort, obviously, though, and likely wouldn't get site admins to be on board because the majority of users would simply disable cookie usage globally. Or we're just back to the days of niche power users using noscript/ghostery while everybody less savvy continues to have a shitty web experience.

I don't really have a solution to this problem, but I do know we need to get the web in a place where privacy is viable and usability on sites you may only visit once is enjoyable.