Comment by cgearhart
1 year ago
I have been feeling this quite acutely for several years now, but it does seem like it’s been accelerating. In my head I’ve been blaming LLMs—appification was already driving content into silos, but the locks came out quickly this past year as the silos realized they were giving away very valuable data for free. I guess the sad part for me is that the internet mostly feels like a waste of time at this point—everything is designed and optimized to maximize “engagement” (ie monopolizing your attention) and that’s not well-aligned with being _useful_. Cookie banners, paywalls, spam—everywhere. Mobile sites are practically unusable—half page banner ad at the top, video ad auto playing underneath it, ad network drawer sliding up from the bottom, interstitial ads in the content itself, a popup over the page asking you to sign up for an account, a chat bot in the corner, and a “continue reading” fold mid page. It’s just…not fun anymore.
Yes. Although you can block a lot of stuff (I run a pi-hole and put my connection through it via a VPN when I'm on the road), the bigger issue is really the content itself is being warped by what you describe too. Take Threads, to which I've recently moved in preference to Xitter. It's quite clear that whether conscious or not, a large section of people on there are playing for followers, making stupid controversial statements to get attention because that's how things work now.
I wonder what it will be like in a few years. How much worse can it get? Will the web be a desolate wasteland with a few social media pages people "flee" to, while the more tech savvy will start using alternative platforms again, like Gemini, IRC, etc.?
In the worst case I could see content platforms start competing on those terms and a resulting winner-take-all consolidation to the point that “the internet” becomes synonymous with WinnerPlatform. (This has already happened to some degree with things like government offices making official announcements exclusively on closed platforms like X or Facebook.) There will always be nerds and hackers who have small personal sites, but the internet would be falling short of its potential if, for example, you needed a Facebook account to participate in government.
A bit ironic that the very thing the web freed itself from already once (walled gardens from the likes of AOL) now comes back again much stronger.
You should set your browser to always open pages in Reader View. Especially on mobile. If needed, you can easily turn it off for specific pages. This blocks all crap and leaves you with the text and images only.
I will give this a try. Thanks!
In iOS Safari you can then long-click the reader icon to jump out of reader mode on the current page.
If you want to make it permanent for that domain, you click the Reader icon -> Web page settings -> Disable automatic reader view.
Cookie banners aren't designed to optimize engagement, they're forced on websites by the EU.
Paywalls aren't designed to optimize engagement, they kill it! Paywalls slaughter almost all your traffic and kill social media virality dead, but they can still work out better than trying to fight ad blocking.
Spam, well, most spam is short. They want to get your attention and bring you to their shop. It's not really about doomscrolling from there on.
So if you're complaining about both ads and paywalls then really you just want content made by volunteers for free. But as Wikipedia has shown, that can work great for a short time until the normies get exhausted and move on, leaving behind the truly crazy fanatics to stay in charge. It's not necessarily better.