I do look at everything manually but I know different people have different experiences, I can’t say I am never going to link to an annoying web site (wouldn’t it be nice if adding a cookie popup immediately caused a panic because “our analytics must be broken!”) but I do want to limit how frequently I post them and require some positives to balance out negatives. Also my RSS reader is showing me so much stuff I like now that I can afford to filter some out.
Is there any kind of software or service that takes a URL and returns an “annoyingness” score?
So whatever metric you use, there’s going to be subjectivity.
Some ideas:
• Create a Chrome extension that asks people to thumbs up/down a website then collect those results.
• Do a Facemash thing like in Social Network – put 2 sites side by side and ask which is more annoying
• Create your own Annoyance Index that can be automated. Say start with 100 points and subtract X points for a pop up, Y points for scrolljacking, Z points for ad block detection, etc. etc. Figure out the threshold for annoying/not annoying and there you go
Obviously there’s going to be a ton of bias in whatever you come up with. And you’ll have to decide whether a good site can be annoying or not.