[sturgill]

Still not close to the same. I pollute a river and generations struggle. I distract you while you’re browsing online and the real impact rounds to zero.

Eventually you’ll die and no one will care about that time you got annoyed. But no one is ever going to swim in the Gowanus... at least not without billions of dollars being spent...

[bsanr2]

Me? Sure. Multiply that by the number of internet users globally, and the number of interactions they have with these sites. A half second of distraction is double-digit man-years every day.

Or, you can think of it in the context of how easily it is for some people to lose their train of thought. An unexpected distraction of even a split-second can mean minutes of trying to remember what was forgotten, and the mental effort involved therein.

There's a reason why people complain about pop-ups: they represent a real cost to our limited focus and therefore productivity. That means a lot of good ideas and a lot of work gets delayed or goes unrealized towards efforts like "how to clean up polluted environments."