Posted on 09/24/2023 3:36:56 PM PDT by Openurmind
There’s an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web. A web which has only one objective: making us click. It measures clicks, optimises clicks, generates clicks. It gathers as much information as it could about us and spams every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications, vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent titles.
A web which boils down to Idiocracy in a Blade Runner landscape, a complete cyberpunk dystopia.
Then there’s the tech-savvy web. People who install adblockers or alternative browsers. People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.
Between those two extremes, the gap is widening. You have to choose your camp. When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content.
Most of the time, I don’t bother anymore. The link I clicked doesn’t open or is wrangled? Yep, I’m probably blocking some important third-party JavaScript. No, I don’t care. I’ve too much to read on a day anyway. More time for something else. I’m currently using kagi.com as my main search engine on the web. And kagi.com comes with a nice feature, a "non-commercial lens" (which is somewhat ironic given the fact that Kagi is, itself, a commercial search engine). It means it will try to deprioritize highly commercial contents. I can also deprioritize manually some domains. Like facebook.com or linkedin.com. If you post there, I’m less likely to read you. I’ve not even talked about the few times I use marginalia.nu.
Something strange is happening: it’s not only a part of the web which is disappearing for me. As I’m blocking completely google analytics, every Facebook domain and any analytics I can, I’m also disappearing for them. I don’t see them and they don’t see me!
Think about it! That whole "MBA, designers and marketers web" is now optimised thanks to analytics describing people who don’t block analytics (and bots pretending to be those people). Each day, I feel more disconnected from that part of the web.
When really needed, dealing with those websites is so nerve breaking that I often resort to… a phone call or a simple email. I signed my mobile phone contract by exchanging emails with a real person because the signup was not working. I phone to book hotels when it is not straightforward to do it in the web interface or if creating an account is required. I hate talking on the phone but it saves me a lot of time and stress. I also walk or cycle to stores instead of ordering online. Which allows me to get advice and to exchange defective items without dealing with the post office.
Despite breaking up with what seems to be "The Web", I’ve never received so many emails commenting my blog posts. I rarely had as many interesting online conversations as I have on Mastodon. I’ve tens of really insightful contents to read every day in my RSS feeds, on Gemini, on Hacker News, on Mastodon. And, incredibly, a lot of them are on very minimalists and usable blogs. The funny thing is that when non-tech users see my blog or those I’m reading, they spontaneously tell me how beautiful and usable they are. It’s a bit like all those layers of JavaScript and flashy css have been used against usability, against them. Against us. It’s a bit like real users never cared about "cool designs" and only wanted something simple.
It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can’t stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.
Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in two.
You know that famous "dark web" that journalists crave to write about? (at my request, one journalist once told me what "dark web" meant to him and it was "websites not easily accessible through a Google search".) Well, sometimes I feel like I’m part of that "dark web". Not to buy drugs or hire hitmen. No! It’s only to have a place where I can have discussions without being spied and interrupted by ads.
But, increasingly, I feel less and less like an outsider.
It’s not me. It’s people living for and by advertising who are the outsiders. They are the one destroying everything they touch, including the planet. They are the sick psychos and I don’t want them in my life anymore. Are we splitting from those click-conversion-funnel-obsessed weirdos? Good riddance! Have fun with them.
But if you want to jump ship, now is the time to get back to the simple web. Welcome back aboard!
I am negan
Yet “Ploum” hasn’t discovered the minimalist FR?
“...spams every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications, vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent titles.” — No kidding. Sites now have three or four popups you have to dismiss, endless embedded videos, and tons of crap I don’t want to see. I use the “Reader” view in Safari to block most of that crap. When it rarely doesn’t work, I switch to Brave which has an even higher success record at blocking crap.
I use ExpressVPN, BitDefender TrafficLight, BitDefender TrafficLight, 1Blocker (lifetime 153,265 actions blocked as of just now) and Safari to block trackers. The number of trackers is astounding.
I like that sites are now adhering to the law that they have to ask your consent to put cookies on your computer. Lots of the cookie consent pages are awful, but I’m finding that my preferences are carrying over.
The web is a colossal mess.
Have to try some of that stuff out.
Not sure how you are applying it? :)
“Yet “Ploum” hasn’t discovered the minimalist FR?”
This article was referred to me on ZeroNet. Most everyone there uses P2P decentralized selfhosted networks.
So they don’t cruise the top tier indexed net much. But excellent point. From the first time I came to the Free Republic I have appreciated the fantastic minimalist script!
In fact, as soon as I started to read that article the FR hit my mind. :)
“P2P decentralized selfhosted networks”
I worked for a company that had great P2P tech for video delivery in corporations. We had a good customer base including GM, some large banks and other big companies, but lower and lower bandwidth prices kept eroding our market.
I never really trusted P2P on my home equipment as I didn’t know what was coming and going. It always struck me as a way to turn your home machine into a spam server, drug trade server or porn server without you knowing until the FBI knocks on the door.
Be online like it’s 1989: Synchronet! No web, no problem!
“””When browsing on the “normal web”, it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content.
Most of the time, I don’t bother anymore. The link I clicked doesn’t open or is wrangled? Yep, I’m probably blocking some important third-party JavaScript. No, I don’t care. I’ve too much to read on a day anyway. More time for something else.”””
I do as well, even for something I want to buy, if I click on it to check the size or something and a pop-up hides the item, then I move on, they won’t even let us look at the display windows anymore.
“I never really trusted P2P on my home equipment as I didn’t know what was coming and going. It always struck me as a way to turn your home machine into a spam server, drug trade server or porn server without you knowing until the FBI knocks on the door.”
I understand those concerns big time. But a secure private network can be constructed using unique porting, encryption, extreme certification, hashing, unique Bitcoin ID and such. Been playing with ZeroNet for about a year now and while it is dirtied up already, A fork of the protocol would be an excellent base to build your own off grid private and secure P2P network on the side.
One has to consider that the concerns you have could happen just as well on the clear net as it could on a P2P net. If someone doesn’t have all the tools like you and I use, a website full of forced scripts could also inject illegal stuff in your machine. So P2P is no more dangerous than the clear web.
ZeroNet is truly worth taking a look at. The documentation is extremely interesting in how it works. It has back and forth security checks like crazy...
“I do as well, even for something I want to buy, if I click on it to check the size or something and a pop-up hides the item, then I move on, they won’t even let us look at the display windows anymore.”
Yep, I move on and look elsewhere for it. I was checking out at an autoparts website one time and when I got to the checkout financial page my NoScript was showing 6 hidden third party scripts also gathering my private financial information simultaneously.
In no way should any extra parties be gathering that info, the seller and the financial processor only! So I entered nothing, scrapped the purchase, and called their legal dept about it. Sent them screen shots...
More need to get off their butts and do the same thing...
“Be online like it’s 1989: Synchronet! No web, no problem!”
Gopher and Gemini... lol :)
https://www.makeuseof.com/build-a-gemini-server-linux/
I don’t care what they track because there is a very low correlation between what I click on and my actual buying.behavior.
“I don’t care what they track because there is a very low correlation between what I click on and my actual buying.behavior.”
It not just about your buying habits or financial data. They track political data now like crazy. Sites, keywords, Etc.
But what you share is the best practice... “Use it wisely”. If you never go to or participate in conservative or Christian sites you will never have to worry.
Oh... Wait....
To me, it’s not so much what they track, as the money they make off that tracking. Although I’m sure the number varies, I’ve seen it reported that a typical user is worth $300 per year to Google. Nope. I refuse to be their product and their profit point because I went to a website that uses their analytics, for example.
bkmk
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.