If the primary goals of your product's design are engagement and ad revenue, of course you're going to chafe at the fact that users don't want to sit comatose in front of screens all day making you money in whichever way you've found is the most efficient. And, of course, when you notice this sort of ~~disengagement~~ behavior, you're going to try and figure out how to trick the user into doing what you want.
These days it seems just as likely that some other EvilCorp™ with more money than you has done a better job hijacking your potential users' attentions as that your users really do have something better to do. But either way, I think the "focus on the user" kind of mantras painted on the walls of so many tech offices have been twisted into something horribly exploitative or beaten into irrelevance by rote repetition without thought. So many "products" being "sold" to users these days aren't really products at all, in the sense that if they do offer the user something of real value it's almost by accident. There is no value, absolutely none, placed on building a quality product for its own sake.
If you're all tangled up in this mess and "users are stupid and lazy" is what lets you sleep at night, I don't blame you.
As someone with ADHD, I really struggle with this.
I spend a lot of time turning off features that were built to distract me. Notification badges, unread item counts, related content, news feeds put in places where they don't belong etc.
Some simple tasks are made deliberately difficult by this. For example, why is it so hard to get just the weather, without any bullshit?
FWIW, if there is a government website for the information you're after, it is likely to have way less bullshit that the ad-supported alternatives. In the US, weather.gov is far from the worst place to get weather information.
We could just go all the way in and say "users are not sentient [therefore we can exploit them to our heart's content]".
Related is my issue with most "data-driven" companies these days. Extensive telemetry and A/B testing isn't "being user centered", it's just the feedback leg of the control system over your users that you're designing to mine them for all they're worth.
These days it seems just as likely that some other EvilCorp™ with more money than you has done a better job hijacking your potential users' attentions as that your users really do have something better to do. But either way, I think the "focus on the user" kind of mantras painted on the walls of so many tech offices have been twisted into something horribly exploitative or beaten into irrelevance by rote repetition without thought. So many "products" being "sold" to users these days aren't really products at all, in the sense that if they do offer the user something of real value it's almost by accident. There is no value, absolutely none, placed on building a quality product for its own sake.
If you're all tangled up in this mess and "users are stupid and lazy" is what lets you sleep at night, I don't blame you.