here's not much to read on the Internet these days. Most mainstream
news sources are so inaccurate it's like reading fiction. Opinion sites
are so polarized they've become predictable. And information sites are
so dumbed down they're not worth reading. (Except ours, of course.)
In the old days you could read about how to make H bombs. That was what the Internet was designed for. Sadly, they took all that stuff down, thinking, I guess, that maybe it was dangerous.
I've become so desperate I've started reading my spam folder.
Websites that demand money have one thing in common: their content is either marginal, badly written, or blatantly political. So it's no surprise they're desperate for money.
I keep an ad blocker on for one reason: if I want to watch humans hopping around as if they've just eaten two bowls of pure sugar with drugs poured on it, I'll turn on my TV. If a site complains about my ad blocker, I check to see what I'm missing. If the ads are anything I'd be remotely interested in clicking on, I leave the blocker off. If there's an animated ad, their bookmark gets deleted. Honestly, I don't see the problem. Surely no one would pay for bandwidth to serve ads that never get clicked on except by accident. My attitude is: I bought your frickin' twenty-five-dollar coffee mug, what more do you want?
I've donated to several websites, but I'm never going to bother to log in. That's too much like being at work. There's one company at work I have to deal with that demands a new password change every three months, then forgets it. Some, like IRBNet, turn navigating their site as a sort of IQ test, where the list of forms you can download changes behind your back depending on what you clicked before. Sometimes their "Wizard" button works and sometimes it doesn't. And there's no way to know whether your form made it to the right place or got sent to oblivion. The bureaucrats love this feature.
Another company set up a way of paying for our carbon dioxide cylinders over the Internet, but forgot to check whether it worked. It doesn't. You can't log in to find out what the problem is and you can't create a new account because your email address is already in their system. Another one lets the customer get all the way to the end, then when you click “order” it pops up a message saying it doesn't know how to calculate the shipping charges, then hangs.
Then there are the sites run by crazy people.
One put a timer on their front page saying their content would be deleted within forty-eight hours because they're being harassed. Then they put all their content (which consisted mainly of sometimes useful and sometimes entertainingly incorrect medical information) behind a paywall and announced that we could get it by paying a fee.
Another one tells me that out of the goodness of their hearts they will allow me to read three articles in a month. Oddly enough, that always seems to happen while I'm thinking to myself what a badly written article it is and wondering why anyone would ever go there.
It happens so fast it's scary. A UK computer tech site started putting up articles complaining about the bad Republicans or the bad Democrats or the bad Tories or whatever, and anybody who complained got downvoted in the comments. And just like that, they're now a political site. Half their technical audience is gone and their credibility is shot.
No matter how well informed you may be, it's lunacy to expect someone to pay to read your opinions. I'd pay someone to do work, like reporting the news, if I thought any of them could do it. But here's their dilemma: if they're political, they're not credible. If they're not political, nobody is interested. Even search engines are doing it with pop-up ads and biased ranking algorithms.
If readers have to pay to read, in the end there will only be one. For all the complaining about news monopolies, you'd think site owners would figure out that they're the ones contributing to it.
nov 01 2022, 5:35 am. edited for brevity nov 05 2022, 4:09 am
