> People seem to think it’s the browser’s job to block ads, but my perspective is that if a business owner wants to make their business repulsive, the only sensible response is to stop using the business. Somehow once technology is involved to abstract what’s happening, people start talking about how it’s their right to unilaterally renegotiate the transaction. Or for another analogy that will likely make you upset: “I hate how this store charges $10 for a banana, so I am just going to pay $2 and take the banana anyway”.
What if every business owner has decided to make their business repulsive, because that’s a winning strategy for them?
The “don’t just use that business” idea has never worked if your goal is actually to change how the market at large behaves. See the much larger industries such as food (boycott factory farming) or energy (boycott fossil fuels)…
“Cheating”, such as blocking ads but using the service anyway is one way to solve that power imbalance and actually put pressure on sites to look for another business model.
I find the entire analogy dubious. When I see a link, I don’t know what sort of ads or JS is on the page it leads to. By blocking ads I am not renegotiating any transactions, because I never entered any transaction. If anything, it seems the author of the post thinks it’s okay for website owners to unilaterally dictate the terms of transaction and force visitors into them.
When I buy a banana, I see the price beforehand. With ads on websites it’s more as if upon me taking the banana, the banana seller gained the right to search my pockets and take anything they fancy.
Ultimately we need a business model that supports publishers sustainably while not being hostile to their readers. Having seen the web evolve from the late 1990s to its current form today (including app-centric content) I think that model will look very different from the options we debate today. PS: I don’t think it’s going to be micropayments.
I love capturing the little moments of daily life that happen at street level as I’m wandering around a city, whether it’s a new one an ocean away or my own neighborhood in San Francisco. These are very different from the photos of the Eiffel Tower that every visitor to Paris has somewhere in their phone camera, different from the ones you’ll find on travel guides or city government websites. You can’t easily find the pictures I want on Google Images… The only alternative is to capture them myself.
This reminded me of my own little online rabbit-hole-ing on Google Maps. For some reason, I like looking at places that are at edges, no matter where they are in the world. The most northern or southern points of a country. Borders between countries. Coasts. Foothills.
I zoom in and out, switch from vanilla view to satellite view. Having gotten my fill of the topography, I tap on Photos to sample that experience from the point of view of people, people I’ll never meet and know nothing about.
It’s not only that those are some of the only public photos from those places, but also that they’re photos from everymen and women. They’re unfocused, unfiltered, poorly framed, repeated, obscured by the photographer themself. Regardless, they’re the best – the only – expression of what it’s actually like to be there.
The Kazakh-Uzbek border. Why? Don’t ask.
I have worn out hours and whole iPhone battery cycles on these tours. They wouldn’t seem as real as they do, were it not for the casual, unthinking contributions of thousands of fellow humans.
Dan Kennedy, a professor who writes often about the business of news and journalism:
Substack isn’t merely similar to blogging. It is blogging, and it’s amazing that so many think that it’s new and different. Like Blogspot, WordPress, Medium (an earlier cautionary tale for journalists) and others, Substack will take its place as just another platform for self-publishing — better than some, but evolutionary, not revolutionary.
The big difference between Substack on the one hand and software and blogging services on the other is that a newsletter lands up in your mailbox, like newspapers and magazines of old.
Things would have been different if RSS had taken off, but here we are. Email apps no longer support RSS; browsers don’t detect and highlight RSS feeds on web pages; Google Reader has been dead nearly a decade.
Dan’s core point stands: anyone can publish, but a rare few will reach a subscriber base large enough to support a full time job newsletter writing.
And that is because just like with blogging services before it, Substack too has struggled with discovery of new and interesting writers, as we have discussed on this site last year.
To that end, the Twitter owned newsletter service Revue is better placed for surfacing new, independent writers because people can set up their Revue newsletters show up on their Twitter profile, like so:
Substack has chosen to generate awareness by encouraging writers with a substantial existing following to start a newsletter. It highlights organic breakout successes. But it still doesn’t have anything beyond this, no directory or recommendation engine to bubble up the thousands and thousands of ordinary people who have their own Substack.
Endnote:
As things stand now, there are still too many steps to set this up. Not everyone sees a ’newsletters’ tab in their Twitter app that prompts them to set one up. Then, if you sign up to Revue with your email and a password, you need to link your Twitter account to your Revue one. And everyone needs to dive into settings and set your newsletter show up on your profile.
There’s a lot of room for Twitter to make this a lot simpler.
It could also build Revue into the Twitter app itself: have Twitter threads optionally published as a Revue issue and vice versa. Have Twitter super-followers optionally join the paid version of the writer’s newsletter for an additional fee. And so on.
The internet is decentralised by design. That means no single entity decides whether a given article on the web is taken down.
But that also means that no single entity can ensure that that article can stay up. If the owner of the domain dies, forgets to renew, or simply chooses not to, it’s gone. The Internet archive can’t archive every single web page that ever existed.
That means it is up to each of us to preserve, privately, those parts of the web that matter to each of us.
I am personally a long-time user of both Instapaper and Pocket (from when they were personal projects of their creators), and have thousands of articles in each. Should either of these services shut down, I will be able to export my saved articles. For articles and web pages with more significant personal value, I also have a folder full of markdown-formatted versions of them. I ended up creating an iOS Siri Shortcut to automate this, which I use every day.
Other ways are to save the full text in Evernote, or OneNote, or Notion using their browser extensions, and they’ll be available to you as long as these services are active. You could also copy the web page, paste it in an email and mail it to yourself, creating a library within email. Which again is accessible – and searchable! – as long as you have access to that email address. There’s no perfect solution.
The important take-away here is that what makes the Internet resilient as a whole makes it fragile at a microscopic level. Saving bookmarks alone is no guarantee that you’ll be able to access something on the web later. You’ll need to save the page itself, and find a system for this that works for you.
While the ‘moral and spiritual’ writing to inculcate a ‘public conscience’ that Bernays describes exists on the Internet today, it is very hard to find.
There are relatively few destinations to discover newness on the Internet today, and they are all heavily optimized to capture and retain attention, not necessarily promote variety and depth. Publishing on the Internet has, in response, optimised these algorithms, which have in turn learnt.
The Internet, as viewed through the lens of its gatekeepers, is a cultural beige.
”People old enough to remember life pre-Internet, what are some less obvious things you miss about that time?”
Work-life balance
“Leaving home and just being gone for the day. No cell phones.”
Mind-wandering
“I miss spacing out. Like, you could legit just sit on a bench or ride a bus and space out completely, letting your mind wander into those creative zones. Now phones/tech makes it much harder to get there.”
“Having an idea, finding a new hobby or skillset or project to work on, going to the library or bookstore to educate yourself about it, start learning and growing and excited about a new passion. Now… you look it up online, realize there’s a bunch of people who are wayyy better at it than you will ever be, and so you immediately give up out of discouragement. :\”
Presence
“If there were cameras, it was really different. You used them to take pictures of things or had people take pictures of you. But there was no social media to preoccupy your mind. It was just doing something. And whoever you were with, was who you were with.“
“My former housemate – who is twenty years younger than me – and I both left our phones at home by accident one day. So we kept on keeping on doing the days activities. Some errands and some wandering around. At one point, she turned to me and said “So this is what the 80s were like?”
“We weren’t getting texts all the time. No constant robocalls and spam e-mails. No expectation of instant reply 24/7. No constant stress or pressure. We were just there enjoying the moment and the simple stuff.”
The news cycle
“News only being on at 6pm. That was it. Now we have 6 hours of local news and 24 hours of cable news. Not being bombarded all day with “news.” And when you saw “Breaking News” on the screen you knew some serious shit went down.”
A curious one for me was one about identity:
“The ability to start over. I moved a lot, every move I could reinvent myself, bookworm, punk, preppie, I got to try out lots of aspects of my personality and my past wasn’t a factor.”
and its reply “I think especially when young it’s genuinely damaging to be locked into an identity by the stuff you have said / done years ago. How are we supposed to grow? Also being judged by the norms of a previous era which are not cool now.”
The News is like alcohol. Both are drugs that give you a quick buzz but both are depressants. Both are habit forming. Some people can do moderation but many struggle with that.
2020 showed us that if you lock people in their homes for months on end, deprive them of the people they love, their basic freedoms and hook them up to The News and Social Media 24 hours a day, they go completely mental.
it has felt like The Public Square is broken. Online discussion is a poor substitute for face to face discussion. It’s only when discussing things face to face that you get the full range of vocal cues, body language and tonal emphasis.
To me, the most important bit in the post was this:
We can choose to reduce and control our intake. We can get more of our information from primary sources.
The most reliable information in the right context is from primary sources. It’s suprising how many news articles, tweets and blog posts all eventually quote the same source. And how different interpretations (not always malign) can change the original meaning.
But locating that source takes time. And it follows that because you can only read so many news sources, that you pick them carefully.
Donald Trump has a new website. A lot of the coverage I have read is about how it is essentially a blog filled with tweet-sized rants (example coverage).
I think the most notable aspect of the website is how transparently and aggressively it is optimised to be a money-making machine.
Here is my experience (I am outside the US). This popup greets you when you visit the site.
The text is endearingly deceptive, panders to ego and assumes lack of attention. For example, “If you step up in the NEXT HOUR, we’ll make sure your name is the FIRST name on the list” with a large timer counting down from one hour. But also in the middle of it all, “The countdown has ended, but you can still donate below”
If you linger too long on the page, you get this other popup informing you that the ex-president wants to see you on the ‘top of the donor list’, whatever that means. Tapping ‘complete my donation’ simply dismisses the popup, but presumably you are now more likely to finish the transaction.
All of this is before you’ve even seen the home page of the site itself.
Anyway. You navigate back to the popup and dismiss it. Here is the actual home page:
There are three buttons on this screenful, and none of them have anything to do with what Trump has to say. They all have to do with money. Scrolling down, you get yet another contribute button.
The focus of the coverage, Trump’s new blog, is behind that tiny ‘Desk’ link at the top. It’s clear what Trump wants his supporters to click on.
So. Since ‘contribute’ is the main call-to-action, let’s tap on it. You’re taken to a page looks very much like the one you were taken to right at the beginning, complete with hard-to-notice default opt-ins.
Donating on the earlier page would put you on the ‘official donor list’. Donating here would put you on the ‘official founding member donor list’.
If you linger here, the same popup as earlier nudges you.
I couldn’t contribute because I am not “a U.S. citizen or lawfully admitted permanent resident”, so I haven’t experienced what happens after.
But if you navigate back and tap on the other major button, ‘Shop’, you’re taken to this store:
This is the checkout page:
When you check out an item, you aren’t buying it. You’re still donating. Even when you’re in the ‘Save American Shop’. I’m not sure if this is standard practice across USA political organisations.
I’m also not sure if the ten dollars for ‘shipping, handling and fees’ is normal. I’ve never bought items on a USA website. Seems somewhat high.
Finally, when you do tap on Desk, that tiny link at the top that is the center of all the coverage about Trump’s new online presence, this:
The first button, the first actionable click on the screen is the ‘Contribute’ button. Right alongside the post. Bolder than the actual text of the posts themselves.
One last thing. The privacy policy makes clear what the organisation can do with your data:
We reserve the right to use, share, exchange and/or disclose to Save America affiliated committee and third parties any of your information for any lawful purpose, including, but not limited to, as described in Section 3.
And what’s in section 3? All this and more:
This gives the organisation the ability to monetise your data, over and above the contributions you make to it.
So.
The site makes no pretence about who it is for. It doesn’t seek to convert; it’s for the faithful. Back in January, we had discussed this when several of Trump’s social media accounts were suspended:
Anyone who engages with Trump and his community on this [then-not-yet-live] website and forums is someone who has joined for that specific reason. No one other than news reporters covering Trump and his network will join.
Because it’s for the faithful, the site doesn’t need to create talking points; the 24×7 news cycle of outrage creates them already. He knows that his opinions will be picked up by news websites and channels and social media personalities even if they are buried deep on his site. Why, those people have probably set up alerts for new posts.
The true utility of the people who actually visit those site, the ordinary right-wing USA citizen, is their money. That is what Trump’s website is for. And it has done a truly outstanding job.
… a 2018 experiment in which students visited a museum and looked at paintings. Some were asked simply to observe. Some were asked to take photographs. Some were asked to both take photographs and distribute them via Snapchat. The group that later remembered the paintings best comprised those who simply observed and took no photos. “The very process of taking photos,” Baron writes, “interferes with the cognitive act of viewing.”
This isn’t the same as reading on a Kindle device, which is distraction-free – as much as any paper book. Perhaps the writer means reading on iPads and phones. These are constantly connected, run many apps and interrupt your reading with notifications. In that case, the article title is misleading: “A Book You Remember, a Kindle You Forget”
Other semantics in the article like “reading” a book versus “using” a book – to contrast paper books and e books – don’t help either: a linguist quoted in the article uses these terms to compare the serendipity of finding passages when you thumb through a book with the ‘ego centric’ searching through of an e book. I could not possibly count the number of times I have simply given up looking for a passage in a paper book because it was impractical to thumb through. Or the number of times I have plodded through a story despite forgetting a detail about a character because it was too hard to look up. Search makes this possible.
Of course thumbing through a paper book, especially a collection of short stores or articles, doesn’t translate well to the e book world. In my view that’s an example of the tradeoffs we make when we move from one medium to another. (And, secondarily, the stagnation of innovation in digital publishing)
Here are more such tradeoffs, either way:
With a paper book I’m stuck with the font, size, margins, and so on – aesthetic decisions the publisher has made. I can change each of these on a Kindle to make reading convenient, because these are ergonomic decisions for me.
I highlight and revisit passages in Kindle books vastly more than with print books. That improves my recollection of parts I found significant.
There is a romance to carrying a paper book around, each of us sneaking a peek at what our fellow citizens are reading. In comparison Kindles are identical, antiseptic. Even with the recent software update that displays the title of the book on the Home Screen.
Few experiences beat reading a book outdoors, whether paper or Kindle. This was in eight degree celsius weather and worth every shiver.
But with a Kindle you’re carrying dozens of books at once and reading several simultaneously. With the (as of this writing, latest) Kindle Paperwhite with Bluetooth you can also listen to audiobooks (I bought the 32GB one with LTE & Wifi refurbished for nearly ⅓ off).
The 2018 Kindle Paperwhite
There is also a romance to having one’s personal library in bookcases of one’s choice instead of in, say, software like Apple Books or Calibre that lives in your computer(s). Once again, you give up portability and flexibility.
Then, the social experience of lending and borrowing books does not translate well to our tightly DRM-controlled e book world today. Perhaps this will change.
I think what we lose most of all is serendipity. There’s been much written about this including in the article. We have no meaningful digital equivalent of public libraries. No bookstores that you can lounge in on benches, floors or on footstools. There is no equivalent of Bangalore’s Blossom or New York’s Strand.
It’s hard to quote one or two essential sentences by Goldhaber, so I’ve had to go beyond in order to do him justice. I think it’s worth your attention to read on:
Understanding attention scarcity
He was obsessed at the time [in the 1980s] with what he felt was an information glut — that there was simply more access to news, opinion and forms of entertainment than one could handle. His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention.
This is a zero-sum proposition, he realized. When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else.
Understanding attention hijacking
“When you have attention, you have power, and some people will try and succeed in getting huge amounts of attention, and they would not use it in equal or positive ways.”
[In 1997] He outlined the demands of living in an attention economy, describing an ennui that didn’t yet exist but now feels familiar to anyone who makes a living online. “The Net also ups the ante, increasing the relentless pressure to get some fraction of this limited resource,” he wrote. “At the same time, it generates ever greater demands on each of us to pay what scarce attention we can to others.”
“Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it,” he wrote in the journal First Monday. “The value of true modesty or humility is hard to sustain in an attention economy.”
Politics and Attention
Most obviously, he saw Mr. Trump — and the tweets, rallies and cable news dominance that defined his presidency — as a near-perfect product of an attention economy, a truth that disturbed him greatly…
Living in a rural area, he suggested, means being farther from cultural centers and may result in feeling alienated by the attention that cities generate in the news and in pop culture. He said that almost by accident, Mr. Trump tapped into this frustration by at least pretending to pay attention to them.
he was deeply concerned about whether the attention economy and a healthy democracy can coexist. Nuanced policy discussions, he said, will almost certainly get simplified into “meaningless slogans” in order to travel farther online,
“We struggle to attune ourselves to groups of people who feel they’re not getting the attention they deserve, and we ought to get better at sensing that feeling earlier,” he said. “Because it’s a powerful, dangerous feeling.”
