I've been on the ol' WWW for a really long time, at least, it feels like a long
time. I'm not going to claim I was one of the first movers or anything like
that, but I've been around long enough to see the transformation of the world
wide web into something great and with huge potential to a place where
advertising reigns supreme and attention is being aggressively and subtly
controlled and personal data is being collected, aggregated, and sold to anyone
that wants it. I'm being slightly hyperbolic, of course, but the world wide web
we have today is a huge step backward from what we had ten or even twenty years
ago.
Not that all changes are bad, of course. The extra bandwidth we have now is
great for downloading and sharing software and media, for example.
Around the middle of last year, I set some goals for myself. One of them was to
spend less time doing mindless things on the Internet, and another was to limit
the amount of advertising in my life. The idea being that I can use the time
that I 'save' by not scrolling through posts forever looking for something
interesting to read (i.e. the 'slot machine disguised as a website' model) or
being advertised to (exact numbers are hard to come by, but I've seen reports
that television networks show commercials for about 15 minutes every hour, or
about 25% 0f the time).
I'm not coming out saying that advertising is bad or immoral or should be
abolished. I'm just saying that I decided that I wanted to limit its impact on
my life in an effort to do other things.
So, I quit social media. Twice. (The first time didn't stick because twitter had
a security breach and I had to reset my password anyway. I stuck around for a
few months, but ended up quitting again since it just wasn't worth it to keep
going. See 'Quitting Social Media' on this very gopher hole).
I installed a pi-hole on my network to help stem the avalanche of ads that
assault my browser on a daily basis, and to also attempt to limit the amount of
personal data that my browser leaks about me (i.e. by blocking all domains owned
by Facebook, for example). I also started to limit the amount of television that
I consume, since I can't really block ads there. (I should note that I don't
pirate shows, either. The broadcasters have decided that they will make the
shows available with ads inserted, and I have decided that I can either wait and
buy the show on physical media later or I'll just do something else). I'm not
(completely) a mooch, though. I'll still support sites that I think are worthy
with cold, hard, cash, if that option is available at a price I can afford.
The next step that I decided I wanted to do was to stop looking at comments. I
have no real objection to comments in principle, and forums are great places to
have discussions (usually), but I got tired of seeing half-written articles that
don't have a conclusion, but they rely on comments to flesh out the points being
made, and then getting lost in the comments trying to find anything worth
reading. It was pretty easy to add Disqus to my pi-hole, which took care of
comments on way more websites than it should have.
If I'm using a full-blown graphical web browser, I also like to browse in
whatever private mode they have available. I realize that this doesn't really
enhance my privacy all that much, but it's convenient for a lot of reasons. But,
today I was greeted with a similar message from two different news sites (both
pretty large) that blocked the content with a modal that said, effectively, that
browsing in private mode was 'not supported' by the website, and that I had to
either pay them money (i.e. 'subscribe' for a lot more than I felt the content
was worth), or leave. I should note that this was irrespective of if I had an
adblocker on. I got the message *even if I allowed ads*. I chose option C, which
was to disable Javascript and read it anyway (mostly out of spite), but that
only worked on one of the sites. The other one required Javascript to show me
more than a blank page, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
On one hand, this was extremely troubling to me. The sites were telling me that
I have to consent to tracking or go be private somewhere else. On the other
hand, though, it's really easy to just not visit that site again, which
concomitant with my goal of spending less time looking at fluff (if
something is important enough, there will be lots of outlets reporting on it, so
there are always choices). But I worry that it's going to be part of a larger
trend. I've already seen content that won't display if you don't run their
javascript (I also like to browse in text-based browsers from time to time), or
if you refuse to set cookies, so I suspect that this is just continuing that
trend.
It's kind of weird to me in a way. Taking steps to reduce advertising in my life
has indeed given me a lot more free time, but I'm still struggling a little bit
trying to figure out how to spend it (that's a problem I can live with). And
there's also the elephant in the room that the company I work for gets its
entire operations budget from selling advertising, which is a little bit
awkward, sure, but I'm not trying to eliminate advertising completely from the
planet, nor am I even saying that advertising is bad, so that's a problem I can
live with until I can solve it.
