Webshites [sic] that include multiple pop-ups, privacy violations, and other nastiness that get in the way of me reading the text on the page ought to go bankrupt.
They provide a public dis-service and the world is better off without them.
Yes, there needs to me a new business model for monetising content.
Mostly because it's not free. The money still comes from you, otherwise targeted tracking and advertising wouldn't make a profit, and wouldn't exist. For advertising supporting "free stuff", you have to accept one of a handful of potential realities:
* Advertising companies are taking a loss, and are funding free websites out of the good of their hearts. (we know that this is not true)
* Advertising companies make a killing, but the money still somehow doesn't come from you, so it is somehow being taken from somewhere else, or the companies paying for the advertising are taking a huge loss.
* The money actually still comes from you, but most of it is going to the advertisers instead of the content that you actually want to support, and it comes from you in a roundabout way over a longer period of time so you don't even notice it.
In short, if the companies are getting the money to run their "free content" AND the advertising companies are making a big profit, where does the money actually come from? It has to come from somewhere, it isn't being printed and gifted to the advertising companies. There's only one place I can see that this money comes from, and that's the people being advertised to.
Why is anybody okay with being psychologically manipulated knowing that the benefits of the manipulation primarily come to the manipulators rather than the content that they like? And also knowing that the manipulation itself continually warps and corrupts the content as everything is being optimized toward pure "Engagement" rather than actual useful information? Wouldn't you rather pay directly for the thing that you like than be subtly manipulated into paying some weird third party longer down the line?
The power gained over people when they submit to being monitored by pocket 1984 telescreens leads to totalitarian bullshit, inevitably. Free stuff for now, lost rights forever. It doesn't matter who is recording you, the information will end up in the wrong hands, and has. Maybe I seem hyperbolic, but on longer time scales there is certainly a trend towards taking our agency from us as we become more dependent on tech. There is no free lunch. What I would give, to be the guy everyone hates for taking their free shit away and saving democracy...
Websites had ads before analytics, they just weren't targeted specifically to you. They had to make educated guesses based on the content of their site, in the same way magazines did.
Exactly. And it's also frankly absurd we've been accustomed to the idea of ad networks autonomously publishing content on websites. The idea that a serious magazine would have printed an ad that no-one had seen before would have been bizarre. Today however you see this "get rich fast" and "miracle weight loss" ads on otherwise reputable news sites.
Ads are OK but it's the tracking of me which is what I hate. An ad you can ignore but tracking is at the least annoying at the worst feels invasive, dangerous, security implications.
