i guess follow me @bethposting on bsky or pillowfort


discord username:
bethposting

bethposting
@bethposting

and has intrusive sponsored posts and ads" and like... yes? yes that's what most of the modern internet is like. welcome back after your 20 year long coma i guess.

like, do you just always use adblock? do you only visit like 3 websites? how are some people who work in tech this disconnected from the realities of what the vast majority of the modern internet is like for the vast majority of users.

it must be nice to have the option to never look at stuff like reddit or quora but sometimes those are the only places you can find niche documentation or help for something like R or statistics or 3D printing or emulators


ireneista
@ireneista

everybody should be upset at how heavily monetized and gamified and network-effect-y every website is

we need to all keep being upset about it and demand better, even when we know there's no alternative sometimes in the short term


bethposting
@bethposting

for example the main browser i use on my phone? it simply does not support browser extensions. not to mention adblock and advertisers are in a constant arms race and i'm worried Google Chrome is going to become a monopoly and have built-in adblock that blocks everything but Google-affiliated ads.

and lots of people HAVE to use the big platform websites, for their jobs or for school, like the time in college where an art history class required me to get Instagram



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in reply to @bethposting's post:

in reply to @ireneista's post:

Agreed. A lot of the web is designed in such an invasive and predatory way, I don't think I can ever be completely comfortable with it. Even if there isn't something better, we should acknowledge that the status quo often is bad.

And from my limited experience, the effect on non-tech users seems even worse. They don't know that 6 out of the 7 Download buttons are actually ads or that the first few results are sponsored garbage or this one post actually isn't from a normal user but an ad agency and I have heard more than enough times "shouldn't computers make things easier? I don't understand why this tech stuff is so complicated." and it's disheartening.

I simultaneously don't think all aspects are inherently bad. The whole gamification trend for example makes me actually use some things instead of procrastinating. Feels more useful to me. Although I wish the next step wouldn't be to monetize the interaction 😅

sure! we could see very careful gamification being fine when there is not a corporate entity involved. having a corporation in the loop means that the incentive will be to use the gamification in predatory ways, over time, even if it starts out being reasonable.

yeah i always use adblock (uBlock) and i usually use site proxies (nitter, breezewiki, ...), old.reddit.com for reddit, or extensions like DistractionFree Youtube to block out all the noise. I also use uBlock Origin's element blocker tool to block out lots of noise from pages I visit regularly (even here on cohost, where I use it to get rid of the lil notifications dot)

i have gone through a LOT of effort to pave a road i can walk that isn't the most awful experience and i dont like that it was necessary but i like that i did it

for sure. we have, too. we also have been fairly successful at just, yes, never using most of these sites, or using them only in very small ways. we're allergic. not physically but, like, cognitively. it helped to give ourselves permission to just not do things.

site:reddit.com continues to be one of the best ways to cut down search engine results from "blogspam that is meaningless" to "posts i can derive some meaning and build answers from" so there's that

none of the sites i just listed other than cohost are things i browse recreationally. but while im there id rather take less psychic damage

this is like my sole way of finding actual answers to any questions pertaining to like

  • wayland
  • getting various games working on linux
  • mechanical keyboards
  • obscure macOS/iOS problems

to name a few.

like it has people asking real questions and giving real answers to weirdly specific problems in the same way that forums historically did. for linux stuff it's either arch wiki, gentoo wiki, arch forums, or reddit, and everything else is just an endless sea of nonsense

but yeah it's mainly tech support stuff / basic HOW-TOs, not actual in-depth technical details. no that stuff I cant even find on purpose with search engines i just ask in all the chats im in and if nobody knows i get to either read the source or give up until i accidentally stumble on the answer a year later

in reply to @bethposting's post:

at work, we're not allowed to use an adblocker (Microsoft Edge voice:this application is managed by your organization) and I'm frankly disgusted every time I'm trying to look up some bit of SQL syntax I forgot and see all the ads.

I do lament the old days when the internet wasn't so stuffed with SEO-optimized garbage of websites written for machines to look at, so someone can make $0.0001 per view

I hate being a jaded elder millennial but alas

in reply to @bethposting's post:

meow, sorry if I added to it, tbh I am sleepy andf was just autoposting without trying to make any sorf of point. Alfo to be fair among teh websites I visit are Twitch andf Youtube which are far fwom cool and even with adblock still suffer fwom a lot of the Delineated Issues, hehe