On 03/02/2017 04:18 AM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
On Wednesday, 1 March 2017 at 18:28:00 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)
wrote:
Well, it's Google's main domain, and they've kinda already settled
into a pattern of making decisions more on self-serving grounds than
for the good of the product/users. "Don't be evil" doesn't exactly set
a very high bar.
I don't know, I have more trouble with Safari and Edge than Chrome and
Firefox.
Well, web devs cater to Chrome and FF, and tend to ignore Safari/Edge.
And I wasn't really just talking about browsers with that.
The Internet is getting very 1984ish, but this goes way beyond Google,
which I find to be better than average. Have you noticed how you receive
advertising all over the Internet for the same product you looked at a
few days before in a webshop and how Facebook and Linked In lists
suggestions based on people you have only had peripheral interaction
with? Extremely annoying. It makes me rank those companies as shady.
Maybe it's ADD-related or something, but my brain literally isn't
capable of reading a page of text if there's something animating on the
page (usually ads). Even the blinking cursor in a code editor can break
my focus. So I've had to install Adblock Edge and NoScript[1] just to be
*able* to use the web at all (basic, honest-to-goodness accessibility).
So, no, I honestly haven't noticed that phenomenon (although I have
heard about it once before).
[1] Back when I was using Windows more, that Adblock Edge/NoScript combo
also had the additional benefit of keeping my machine much safer from
drive-by malware, even when other people around me were far more careful
about good antivirus, never turned off auto-updates, and were still
having their machines taken over by ransomware - which never touched any
of my machines.
At some point there will be a resistance movement, forking one of the
main browsers and building in collaborative blacklisting etc.
I hope, but I'm skeptical. Big business is definitely headed very 1984,
but that's happening less because of Orwellian control, and more because
of mass apathy and widespread short-sighted self-interest (more Huxley
than Orwell, from what I gather).
I also see certain issues with collaborative rankings - they can only be
as intelligent as the average user, which often doesn't seem to be very
much. And then there's other difficulties like this: https://xkcd.com/937/
