Jim Browning fights the good fight

Yeah a lot of sites (articles) there's an ad between every paragraph or they scroll you to the bottom which has those garbage sites as you try to leave.

> What I hate the most it's how the try to scam no savvy tech people, like grandparents and

Oh, that's my utter bane. My mom knows better, I've taught her how the manipulations work, and then she'll show me a pertinent article on her tablet, and see an utterly outrageous clickbait link from Outbrain or Taboola or the like, like "This mom found out her kids were smoking WHAT?!" and pictures of some bugs or whatever.

And she'll get a guilty and tortured expression and say "Oh, I know they're probably manipulating me, but I have to find out what this is about." No!!! You really don't have to!

I tried to sneakily install ublock, but I made ONE mistake when trying to add a custom filter on a site she regularly visits, which broke her user experience for 3 minutes before I fixed it, and she demanded I immediately uninstall the "hacker programs".

The sad thing about clickbait is that it works wonders, and you'll never guess what happens next!

Shoot, I know you're probably being silly, but I have to ask, WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?!?!?

My grandmother was like that with the National Enquirer and Weekly World News. She knew it was fake garbage but she couldn't resist reading it and you could tell some of it did end up sinking into her mind as being true on some level. But at least those tabloids weren't tracking her. She bought them at the grocery store each week so they didn't even have her on a mailing list. I do believe they had some scammy ads in the back of each issue but I don't recall that ever being a problem for her. Granddad had no interest and just kept to his Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines, both of which at times had articles and ads of questionable quality but were far better than the tabloids and modern online clickbait.

I’m in adtech, and it always frustrates me that the product managers make all of their projects around how can we squeeze out more demand out of existing listeners/viewers. One would think it would be a better experience for all to see fewer, but higher quality/higher CPM ads.

Viewers see less ads, but probably wouldn’t resort to ad blockers if they only saw one ad on a website instead of 10. Advertisers would get better click through rates because you aren’t competing with as many ads. The downside is advertisers have a higher CPM, and maybe the data shows high CPM campaigns don’t work.

Regardless, after working in it for awhile I see how we got where we are. I don’t foresee a world with no ads since the vast majority of people don’t want to subscribe to every website they visit, but maybe there will be a better model in the future.

I hope you can be our savior and burn it all down from the inside.

I even wrote an article on a related topic: push notifications acting as a way to deliver malware to devices by relying on non-technical users being scared into clicking allow.

https://www.lloydatkinson.net/posts/2022/consider-disabling-...