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Opinion/Editorial/Life

On Artifact App Shutting Down

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https://medium.com/artifact-news/shutting-down-artifact-1e70de46d419​

We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way.

After the whole mess with Reddit closing down it’s app for stupid reasons, I was kind fo on the search for a “new social news app”. I’ve sort of just, expanded out into using a few different apps more, also fueled by Twitter ending becoming a shithole.

One of those ended up being Artifact News. It seemed to have a few bugs, for the longest time I couldn’t upload a profile pic, for example, but it worked alright. The news feed was a little more AI-focused than I really would have liked, but it was something. For the most part, RSS has just been my defacto news source anyway.

The closing though, which I learned about in Artifact, felt a little sudden. I mean, I’m not out anything aside from a reading streak, but it’s kind of disappointing because I did like the app. I have been sort of trying to use Post.news as a replacement, but Post has this weird points system. Honestly, my irritation is more with the likely reason it is closing.

It wasn’t profitable, ENOUGH.

Heck, I don’t know the financials, maybe it was hemorrhaging money. A good model they might have gone for is charging a (reasonable) subscription, to remove ads from the articles. I don’t mind paying for news, I like the idea actually, especially if it means removing advertising cancer. I dislike paying for, 20 news sites, at $10+/month. Give me a way to bundle that for $10/month. I don’t read that much news that I need to spend a ton for unlimited whatever.

But I’m getting off track, my issue, and worry is that so many businesses are OBSESSED with endless, constant growth. This company was probably created by some investment group hoping to have 200% growth every month and it was only like, 10% growth every month, so it just, wasn’t good enough.

That shit’s annoying.

What I kind of want is basically, “Tumblr but News Articles”. A feed of news, that I can repost and comment on or like. Artifact didn’t seem to have the repost/reshare aspect, but it had likes and comments.

I’m actually considering posting a few more “commentary on news stories” style posts on the blog, as a sort of, substitute. I already have the little (sort of) daily news digest posts of interesting stories, but sometimes I like to add some context to the links. I actually put in a suggestion on the FreshRSS website that a “notes” box on articles could be useful, especially if your personal notes appear in the shared RSS feed. There is still no liking posts there though. In theory, the Indieweb could solve that issue, but I doubt there is enough demand. That said, sometimes I read a story in my RSS aggregator, and then hit the little “Star Icon” and then have this sort of sad moment of, “Oh yeah, that’s not a like, no one sees that but me.” I could comment more but it seems kind of lame to just leave a spammy-looking comment like “Great content”. WordPress has a like feature, and a follow feature, but the internet isn’t WordPress alone.

I’ll figure something out eventually.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Why is Advertising So Blatantly Bad

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There is some sort of weir shift going on where suddenly companies are increasingly cracking down on thing like Ad Blockers and shared accounts and just generally trying to “monetize more”. I don’t know the in and out details of business operation but I saw it mentioned that part of this is related to the recent raising of interest rates. Essentially, when interest Rates are very very low, debt is profitable (somehow??), so investor types would be more willing to let a company lose money or just not be as profitable as they “could be”. I’m not an expert on this. The moral of that comment was more that because interest rate are rising, investors want more actual return, so prices get raised and crackdowns come on ad blocking.

The focus for today is more on the ad blocking part, and the ads in general.

What Is Ad Blocking

In case you’re loving under a rock, it’s probably good to touch on what Ad Blocking is, and to some extend, how to do it. The what is pretty easy, it’s in the name, it’s the blocking of ads on websites or videos. There are a ton of ways this can be done, I use several layers of blocking myself, and see very very few ads when browsing online.

The simplest and easiest is with browser plug ins. The most effective and easiest is U-Block Origin. At one point there was something just called U-Block, which wasn’t as good, and there are also a couple just called Ad-Block, and Ad-Block Plus, neither of which is as effective. U-Block Origin is the one to use. By default, it chops out a LOT of ads. It also has tools built in to create custom filters as well. For example, I have mine set up to block anything from twitter.com and x.com, because Fuck Musk. I also use the built in element picker to block some annoying “subscribe” pop overs on Youtube. Another useful use for the element picker on Youtube is blocking those annoying “watch next” thumbnails that pop over the last 20 seconds of every video.

You don’t need all this extra though, since out of the box, it does it’s basic purpose.

It’s not always just about ads, I have several other plug ins to filter my web experience. I have one that specifically blocks any Rupert Murdoch owned media. I have a similar one that blocks websites known to spread Climate change denial-ism. Another good one is Consent-O-Matic, which will automatically reject any non essential cookies from those annoying GDPR pop ups.

I also would recommend Privacy Badger and Ghostery to block invisible ad trackers that are present all over the webs.

But how do these work?

All of the data coming to you PC runs to your browser, these tools simply intercept and strip out known sources of advertisers and problematic privacy trackers. When a web page is rendered to your view, on the back end code, it’s made of a bunch of blocks of code for each element. When a filtered element is encountered, it simply, isn’t sent to the display and rendered. There are a lot of easy way to detect ads for these tools, many use standard image resolutions, for example, so any image of that height and width get filtered. Another way to detect them is if they come from 3rd party websites, since most advertisers are private data hoovers, they want to serve the ads directly so they can track data about the user attached to their browser or IP address.

Another layer I use to filter ads is PiHole, which is a DNS server designed to run on a Raspberry Pi and filter network traffic before it even reaches your machine. Without too much complicated technical detail, DNS is essentially the phone book of the internet. Your computer or phone is going through a DNS server somewhere anytime you connect to a domain, because servers, that host websites, all use numerical IP addresses. It’s a name vs a phone number. So the Pi-Hole, when a request is made to a known ad provider, the returned “IP Address” or “phone number” is simply blank.

Why Block Ads Though

I want to make it clear here, I am not opposed to web ads, I am not opposed to people making money on their content. My problem is with how shitty ads have become. It’s not just web ads that are the problem, but ads in general. I kind of blame Google and the algorithmizing of ad networks. In the dark ages, a company would generally have sales people who would court companies and try to get them to advertise to their customers. These ads were “targeted” based on the customer data of the website and generally, related to the website itself.

Presumably, if you’re reading a technology news website, you would be interested in ads for computers or phones. That sort of thing.

Google, the largest and most dominant ad provider, destroyed this.

Google is a massive privacy nightmare and hoovers up every scrap of data about everyone that it can. I can’t express just how much data Google collects, and I’m not going to try. They use this to serve ads to people running it’s ads. The main “selling point” here is that instead of ads targeted to potential users of a website, they get targeted directly at users. Maybe Google had decided I am interested in technology products, so when browsing technology websites, I might get technology ads, but these same ads now ALSO track me around when I am looking into other topics, like toys, or food, or anything.

In theory, it’s better, right?

But is it? If my mindset is on toy news, I’m going to be at best, distracted by an ad for a phone, more likely annoyed, because I my mind right now, it’s on technology.

But what do I know, I am sure there is some marketing group who has done some research showing it’s still “effective”.

The problem I have with this is that it all just becomes an annoying circle jerk of bad. Maybe the ad is “effective” because it’s the only ad I’ve seen for a month. Which just reinforces the idea that this targeting is good. It’s not actually good, it’s just created a bubble which creates a self fulfilling bubble of accuracy. Companies no longer have to compete with each other to get my eyeballs, they just pay the most to beat me over the head with their product until I submit.

Which kind of leads into the bigger issue.

Companies don’t have to actually make good products to advertise at me. There is just this increasingly rapid downward spiral of garbage being pushed through advertising. Shitty fake T-shirts that are 3 sizes too small even when you order the 5x size. Ads for crappy cash grab mobile games that show one game and are in actuality something completely different. Ads for bootleg products through Amazon from “companies” that won’t exist in 2 weeks.

Anyone can pay pennies to each 1000 people and the goal is no longer showing off a quality product to get sales, it’s just to show off any product to get any sales.

This creates another self fulfilling bubble, because it decreasing the effectiveness of ads in general, as people become less and less trusting of this bull shit. Legitimate companies stop advertising on these platforms, as people stop clicking and start using more ad blocking mechanisms. The ads become worthless to buy for any real business or service and scammers don’t mind because increasingly only the most gullible marks start falling for their scams.

It also hurts businesses that rely on ad revenue. The big one is online publications, newspapers, magazines, blogs. More people block ads, less people click ads, now they have to run more ads to make ends meet, and the problem just becomes worse as more people get tired of ads EVERYWHERE and more people block them or stop visiting.

It’s Hard to Feel Bad About Ad-Blocking

This also is a bit self inflicted, so it’s hard to feel bad for these companies. I feel a little bad for the writers, who probably just want to write, it’s not their fault. But when some large publication decides it no longer wants to pay a sales staff or editors and their entire site becomes ad ridden, it’s hard to feel bad about blocking their revenue source.

Stop encouraging this garbage and maybe I’ll stop blocking.

Stop covering your page in large banners on every open space and maybe I’ll stop blocking.

Stop trying to trick me with ads embedded in articles that look like links and maybe I’ll stop blocking.

The people I do feel bad for are the honest folks out there. Because they just become collateral damage. Most ad blocking tools provide the ability to white list websites if you want to support them, but this puts the work on the user to decide what’s worth supporting, and you don’t have any way of knowing without going to work to open things up. It’s just, too much effort to bother.

Subscription Overload

There is if course, the alternative of subscribing. Which is increasingly something publications push for. Limited numbers of free articles per month, or just trying to guilt you about how many articles you’ve read. I don’t mind this concept at all, the issue here is a bit multi-faceted though.

First is subscription overload. “Subscribe for $x per month”. Seems reasonable, except that every website wants $x per month. I could probably manage one or two subscriptions even at $7-8 per month if I wanted. But to read every site, it becomes 10-15 subscriptions at $7-8 per month, or more. Part of this may be my personal cheapness. My opinion on digital subscriptions of any kind though has always been “less is better”. There is essentially zero overhead cost different for digital. Offering a subscription for $7-8/month makes some money, but offering it for $1/month becomes “impulse buy” territory and would likely net a massive number more subscriptions. Is it’ 7-8x as many subscriptions? I don’t know, I don’t care, my question is “is it enough subscriptions to cover operating costs”.

Call me old fashioned but if costs are met, it feels like the goal of publications should be getting their information out in front of as many eyeballs as possible, not so much exponential growth of profits (this will eventually be a post all it’s own).

It’s not JUST the cost though, it’s the internal scammyness so many publications have with subscriptions. It’s the “Get a discount for the first year of 80% off please forget to cancel later” offers. I don’t bother with trials and discounts at all for this reason. If that’s not just “the price” I don’t care. I’m not letting this into my life and workflow only to have to rip it out later when the cost becomes 5x what I initially paid, sorry.

And then there is the part where cancelling is often an actual pain in the ass. I had a few digital subscriptions for a while, and when I wanted to cancel, in several cases, I had to CALL TO CANCEL. I had to talk to a fucking sales person, often in another fucking country, and convince them that no, I didn’t want a new offer, I just wanted to cancel.

This is something that should literally just be a click through checkbox on a profile page of the website.

Trust Destroyed

It’s all part of the endless downward spiral of bull shit I mentioned above. It’s just more scams that drive people like me away from supporting something.

This leads to just a general distrust of anything being pushed or sold. A prime example of this in my area. My state, Illinois, is pushing household solar adoption hard. There are programs that “in theory” make the consumer cost zero. But it’s also not clear how this works. And my overall distrust of anything being “sold” to me, means that even though I would love to have Solar, I don’t have any desire to ever bother with any company that would provide solar, no matter the rebates or later returns. If the state wanted to come in and do it for me and I never see a bill, hey, probably, but i am pretty sure that’s not how any of these systems work.

Any my distrust runs deep enough that I actively avoid the main aisle at my local Wal-Mart when shopping because there are people selling this in the store, and I don’t want to be hassles about it.

And this is just one example. I have grown to actively distrust essentially all advertising at this point. And I have not even BEEN scammed. I have family members who have gotten trash from Facebook ads or been taken in by straight money scammers, which just leads to more reason to be a paranoid ad blocking digital data leech. I want to support sites, but everything is just such a scammy minefield.

Final side note, this is why I actually do like things like KOFI and Patreon, because I can support people, directly, often for a reasonable cost, and I can cancel/stop supporting them if I can’t afford it or no longer want to support them.

It’s Going to Get Worse

It’s going to get worse.

AI Will make it worse. AI is “neat”, it’s also the “filter bubble concept” at an extreme level. When it starts feeding itself live data it’s just going to conclude it’s right about everything because that’s all it’s sending out. AI will be used to target ads, it’ll take all your personal data in and remix it with similar data and spit out a chimera ad with 8 fingers and weird looking eyes and an extra elbow that is a mobile ad for a game where you run an empire selling bootleg T-shirts but the actual app is just a shitty clicker game full of micro-transactions. Bit it will be “AI powered” to be perfectly tailored to get you to spend money on whatever.

There is also the increasing crack down by larger companies on ad blocking. Youtube is supposedly stopping people from watching videos when it detects ad blocking. Google is also pushing this bull shit initiative about “trusted browsers” that will only be used to make it’s tracking stronger. Make no mistake, Google pushes lots of “standards” on the web using it’s massive weight to force changes, it dresses these up as “good for the user and privacy” but they are an ad company. These privacy measures are ONLY pushed because they already have a way around it and it will harm their competitor’s ability to track and advertise.

Companies have experimented with eye tracking to make sure you are actually WATCHING these ads.

PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN

At the end of the day the only way to escape may just be to simply unplug and do something else away from the computer.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Some Thoughts on SOPA and PIPA

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The whole internet is abuzz with SOPA and, to a lesser extent, PIPA talk.  Basically, these two bills in congress, one for the House, one for the Senate.  You can get plenty of information through Google or if you’d like, try the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The gist of this bill, is that it would allow media companies, through the government, to block websites with “pirated content” through manipulation of the Internet DNS system.  Without proper due process of law.  DNS, is essentially the phone book of the internet.  You could also compare it to a road map.  It’s what computers use to know how to find the websites you look for online.  All websites are in fact a series of numbers called an IP address, however remembering 74.125.227.114 is tricky.  Remembering “Google.com” is not.

Feel free to use that link, it leads to Google.  Which brings up one major flaw with this bill.  Pirates will easily circumvent these blocked DNS entries by using IP addresses.  If say, the Pirate Bay is blocked, people will just use it’s IP address instead.

Also likely there will simply be “rogue DNS” servers.

I am not endorsing piracy, I am saying the bill will not do anything to stop it.  People also may suggest the idea of “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to be afraid of”.

The problem with this logic, in every situation, is that the question of “what is wrong” is extremely subjective and often changes.  Guess what, in a world where SOPA passes and becomes law, it starts off simply as it’s told.  Places which host “pirate content” are effectively removed from the internet.  Nevermind that there will also be legal content taken off as well when sites like Megaupload are taken offline.  The block is not single file or even single subsite specific. 

But hey we’re all happier now without The pirate Bay and Megaupload right?

Until people start hosting their content through loopholes on blogger or WordPress.  Sure, it’s against the TOS and both companies work to remove them as they are found but hey, guess what, now they need to be blocked.  Thousands, probably millions, of independent bloggers are now silenced.

Or perhaps the definition of “piracy” and “copyright infringement” gets pushed out even more.  Universal studios puts out a big blockbuster movie, it cost them a shitload of money top make and it gets totally panned by the internet.  Nobody wants to see this movie, all this negative press floating around, well hey look, Blogger Bob used the movie poster in his review.  Nevermind that this may fall under the fare use clause, that’s infringement, let’s close down BloggerBob.com because his negative reviews may be hurting ticket sales.

Just remember, governments generally don’t start off deciding to become repressive totalitarian regimes.  (NOTE: Link will not work 1/18/2012)

I mean hey, we have a precedent now, plus, once a site is “gone” people won’t notice right?  Universal killed BloggerBob, why not suppress a few of those “anti government kooks” out there spreading bad spirits through the country while we’re at it.  We have the mechanism in place after all.  John Q Public doesn’t know what DNS is, he thinks it’s a new sandwich at Subway.

It’s not even that it’s a terribly BAD idea, it’s more that, in an effort to make things “move more quickly” it rejects the idea of due process, and facts, and evidence.

Which also brings up what really is a whole different rant.  The world is changing.  The world is not the US, or Europe, or China, or the Northern Hemisphere.  It’s an entire globe.  The internet is even more-so, and it’s the driving force of the world these days.  Which is the real problem here.  Because despite the best effort to push more crap on what used to be a pretty ignorant and docile public, it’s not working anymore.  Any sort of exaggeration or lie in favor of “marketing” is almost instantly debunked.  People who used to be made to feel better or pushed aside as isolated cases of problems realize that they are not alone.  The internet is the ultimate engine for real democracy.  look at the whole election system, when it took days and months to ride a horse across the country, then things like congress or the electoral college etc were a great idea.  is it even necessary anymore when people can express their opinion and desires to the world instantly?

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Copyright, SOPA, Why You Should Care

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So yesterday was “American Censorship Day”.  This was to… commemorate really REALLY is not the right word, maybe acknowledge or point out that yesterday Congress had a hearing about SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act”.  There are plenty of sites out there talking about this better than I probably can explain but the general gist of the bill is that it would give the movie and music industry, the MPAA and the RIAA, the ability to have a website blocked by DNS servers if it contains infringing or protected copyrighted works.

Now, this is all feel good and great on paper.  If it passes we can block sites like the PirateBay or MegaUpload which are often used to distribute infringing materials.  But then, people often use Bittorrent to download infringing materials, it should probably get clocked too.  Then you have folks uploading TV shows and clips to Youtube, it should probably be blocked too, besides, that gives the secondary benefit of removing all of those entertaining cat videos people seem to prefer to watch instead of crappy sitcoms.  There is also that Facebook thing, where people like to post those videos, which infringe on IP, let’s block it too.

Granted, this is the whole “worst case scenario” mindset and I really doubt Facebook would be blocked.

At least not initially.

Before we get too off track, let’s point out that many people use ThePirateBay and MegaUpload and similar sites to distribute legitimate content.  Even if that’s pushing it, Bittorrent is definitely used for legitimate content.  Download bandwidth is relatively cheap but upload bandwidth is not.  Being able to distribute the file hosting system across hundreds and thousands of hosts with Bittorrent is excellent technology.

Back to the “major players” of Google (with Youtube) and Facebook, yeah, it is probably unlikely they would get blocked.  However, there is a greed mindset that comes in with unchecked power where Youtube could easily be a candidate to be blocked.  As I mentioned, people are increasingly growing interested in independently produced media, be it heavily produced independent films, video bloggers in their bedrooms and offices or even just some guy who filmed his cat for 8 hours and cut together a 30 second string of the best moments.

The movement towards disintermediated user generated content away from the big business models of expensive shows and movies and music is the true “enemy” of the music and record industry.  It’s just not real Politically Correct for the big bad media industry to blame the obvious because there isn’t anything they can really do about it in the end.  The internet revolution for lack of a better term is quickly killing the middleman economy of the past.  I’m not going to get too far off on this tangent though because it would make this even longer than it already is and it’s a topic I’d like to touch on in a separate post.

The point is… the big media giants can use SOPA to essentially close Youtube preventing a lot of independents from even getting exposure in the first place.  The desired and expected outcome would be that everyone comes crawling back to buying albums at $17 each that have 2 almost decent songs on them so they can make money hand over fist ripping off their customers like they did up until 10 years or so ago.

I should point out that I’m using Youtube pretty generically here as it’s interchangeable with pretty much any website centered around user generated content.

Now you might ask, “why would they shut down Youtube, why not just shut down the infringing channel/person?”  This is an excellent point, why can’t they do that?  Doesn’t shutting down a whole website seem a little extreme?  Here’s the punch line for ya, they ALREADY HAVE THIS ABILITY.  It’s called the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act”.  Under the DMCA, if someone starts posting a bunch of episodes of Glee to Youtube, Fox can issue a DMCA takedown notice to Youtube and have those videos removed.  Simple, easy, somewhat effective.  The problem of course is that there is more Youtube content uploaded every minute (maybe it’s second) than there are hours in the day.  Policing all of the content for infringing videos is essentially impossible.  Youtube already has several systems scanners and algorithms in place that scan new uploads as they arrive but they aren’t 100% effective.

They can’t be.  People are clever.  They’ll slow the music down slightly so it doesn’t get caught.  They’ll flip the video of a scene so it doesn’t match.

Which brings up another point.  SOPA will do nothing to stop Internet piracy.  People will find a way if they want to pirate copyrighted materials.  DNS can be blocked but people will just start using the IP address of the websites being blocked.  People will use TOR Networks, people will use proxies that are out of the country (like they do in China which firewalls itself out of the rest of the world).  People will find a way.  PC games started getting ridiculous with their DRM yet there is always a crack available, often before the game is released.  Music on iTunes and other MP3 stores used to have DRM preventing unauthorized play and people figured out how to use the “analogue hole” or just burned them to CD then re-ripped them.  People will find a way.

The people who suffer from all of this tend to be the honest folks.  The guy who didn’t realize he could only authorize iTunes on 5 computers or devices or whatever and now he’s got a new machine and can’t play his songs.  Or the person who wants to play their new PC game on their laptop without having to carry the CD around but the game requires the CD for authorization.  Or worse, the game requires an internet connection to be played at all, which BTW, there are still many people WITHOUT regular internet access who still like to use PCs and play games and use software.

To stop what?  Pirates?  They downloaded an ISO that included a hacked EXE that breaks the encryption or DRM or need for the disc a week before the game was in stores.

The other side of this bill which is quite sinister is the lack of due process involved.  DMCA takedowns are bad enough as they don’t always require proof.  They also get issued against websites which use copyright materials under the Fair Use clause.  Fair use most often involves a copyrighted work being less than a certain length and used for parody or criticism purposes.  Like if a person has a music blog where they review songs, under fair use (I think, I’m not a lawyer) they would be allowed to embed 30 second clips of the tracks into the review.  This takes down entire websites without any due process and barely requires any actual proof of infringement.  Essentially if they say “take it down”, it goes.

The really terrible angle here, as they say, power corrupts and this bill gives too much power to people that don’t deserve it, is, for example, that hypothetical music review blog I mentioned.  Let’s say they are fairly harsh and don’t give too many positive reviews.  We can’t have this negativity floating around getting readers now, negative reviews affect our bottom line.  So the site gets a SOPA notice and disappears.

Criticism out of site, out of mind.