The Casino web

Okay, time at last for another venting about the horrid state of the internet.

I fear this one is rather low-hanging fruit, but oh well. It's not even a

technical criticism in the end, and it's possible that this particular

misfeature is inevitable once the internet becomes something that most of the

world uses; that this problem would rear its ugly head again and again no matter

what protocols or other technology we used. I'm not 100% convinced of that, but

it may be true.

A much bigger and more insidious problem, which I'll write about another time,

is the mammoth "surveillance marketing complex" that underlies so much of the

net. But today's rant is about the public-facing surface of that machine rather

than the deep, dark, behind-the-scenes. To cut to the point, the modern web

feels incredibly tacky and sleazy.

I am not flat out opposed to all advertising on the web, and I do not ad block

aggressively. I use the /etc/hosts file from http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

to block connections to hostile advertising hosts (I trust this, unlike any

browser extension, not to cause my browser to randomly consume huge quantities

of CPU or RAM, as if modern browsers needed any help to do this) and that's

it. This cuts a lot of crap, for which I am grateful, but even I still

regularly see the most awful 'clickbait' advertising of the most formulaic and

hackneyed kind. This stuff is so transparently engineered to appeal to a small

set of predictable and exploitable biases in the readers that it's almost

painful to look at it. I would not be bothered so much if these ads appeared

only on dubious or sketchy websites, but in fact they are everywhere. Even

on websites associated with major institutions from which you might expect some

veneer of professionalism or integrity you will ocasionally get to the bottom

of a page and find that familiar two rows of thumbnails linking to stories

about health risks, financial advise, "unbelievable" photos of attractive young

women, etc. This stuff has passed some kind of threshold and is now normal,

acceptable, business as usual on the web. It's not something to be embarassed

of, it's just there, a kind of ubiquitous background.

The issue cuts deeper than sleazy lowest-common-denominator adverts, though.

Many websites are architected with the express purpose of keeping your eyes in

front of the ads for as long as possible. The most frequently encountered form

of this is websites with "infinite scrolling": as you get toward the end of the

list of posts/comments/links/whatever, Javascript magic is used to load a little

bit more and append them to the end of the page. Many people may think of this

as a convenience, but to me the true intent is painfully obvious. It defeats

the simple time-management strategy of "I'll just read to the end of this page,

then get back to work". These days sometimes there is no end of the page, and

it might take you a while to realise this, and before you know it you've been

glued to the page for 10 minutes longer than you meant to. Of course, at the

end of the day, managing one's time and one's attention is one's own

responsibility and nobody else's. But it seems clear to me that modern websites

are actively trying to encourage failures of willpower. It reminds me of

casinos, where there are no clocks and windows facing the outside, to make it

easier to lose track of time. Huge swathes of the modern web are a casino, but

they don't want you to keep dropping coins into slot machines, they want you to

(i) keep viewing adverts and (ii) keep dropping "coins" of data into the

analysis engines so those adverts can be better targetted. Any little thing

webmasters can do to increase the odds of you doing either of these is

identified and deployed against you.