Megan McArdleās excellent opāed in The Washington Post, āA farewell to free journalismā, has been bookmarked on my phone for months. Itās a very good summary of where things are for digital media, and how the advent of Google and Facebook along with the democratization of the internet have reduced online advertising income to a pittance. Thereās native advertising, of course, which Lucire and Lucire Men indulged in for a few years in the 2010s, and I remain a fan of it in terms of what it paid, but McArdleās piece is a stark reminder of the real world: there aināt enough of it to keep every newsroom funded.
Iāll also say that I have been very tempted over the last year or two to start locking away some of Lucireās 21 years of content behind a paywall, but part of me has a romantic notion (and you can see it in McArdleās own writing) that information deserves to be free.
Everyone should get a slice of the pie if they are putting up free content along with slots for Doubleclick ads, for instance, and those advertising networks operate on merit: get enough qualified visitors (and they do know who they are, since very few people opt out; in Facebookās case opting out actually does nothing and they continue to track your preferences) and theyāll feed the ads through accordingly, whether you own a ārealā publication or not.
It wasnāt that long ago, however, when more premium ad networks worked with premium media, leaving Googleās Adsense to operate among amateurs. It felt like a two-tier ad market. Those days are long gone, since plenty of people were quite happy to pay the cheap rates for the latter.
Itās why my loyal Desktop readers who took in my typography column every month between 1996 and 2010 do not see me there any more: we columnists were let go when the business model changed.
All of this can exacerbate an already tricky situation, as the worse funded independent media get, the less likely we can afford to offer decent journalism, biasing the playing field in favour of corporate media that have deeper pockets. Google, as we have seen, no longer ranks media on merit, either: since they and Facebook control half of all online advertising revenue, and over 60 per cent in the US, itās not in their interests to send readers to the most meritorious. Itās in their interests to send readers to the media with the deeper pockets and scalable servers that can handle large amounts of traffic with a lot of Google ads, so they make more money.
Itās yet another reason to look at alternatives to Google if you wish to seek out decent independent media and support non-corporate voices. However, even my favoured search engine, Duck Duck Go, doesnāt have a specific news service, though itās still a start.
In our case, if we didnāt have a print edition as well as a web one, then online-only mightnāt be worthwhile sans paywall.
Tonight I was interested to see The Guardian Weekly in magazine format, a switch that happened on October 10.
Itās a move that I predicted over a decade ago, when I said that magazines should occupy a āsoft-cover coffee-table bookā niche (which is what the local edition of Lucire aims to do) and traditional newspapers could take the area occupied by the likes of Time and Newsweek.
With the improvement in printing presses and the price of lightweight gloss paper it seemed a logical move. Add to changing reader habitsāthe same ones that drove the death of the broadsheet format in the UKāand the evolution of editorial and graphic design, I couldnāt see it heading any other way. Consequently, I think The Guardian will do rather well.
Since (mostly) leaving Facebook, and cutting down on Twitter, Iāve come to realize the extent of how outdated traditional computing definitions have become. To help those who need to get up to speed, Iāve compiled a few technobabble words and translated them into normal English.
app: in many cases, an extremely limited web browser for your cellphone that only works with one site, as opposed to a proper web browser that works with many sites.
bots: fake, computer-driven profiles masquerading as real humans on, predominantly, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
clean install: something entirely unnecessary, but suggested by tech support people who want to cover up buggy operating systems (q.v. Windows 10).
cloud: hackable online repository of naughty photos of celebrities.
comments’ section: when you see this while surfing, it’s a reminder to leave the web page you are on and make up your own mind.
Facebook: a website where bots live, where post-sharing is intentionally broken to ensure you need to pay for attention. Once paid, your posts are shared with bots, so even fewer humans actually see them.
Facebook friend: (a) a friend; (b) a total stranger; (c) a bot.
Google: (a) a virtual hole into which you dump all your private information, to be sold on to corporations, but feel good doing it because you gave it up to a private company to use against you rather than have the state take it to use against you; (b) a cult that supports (a), whose members will think you have a degenerative brain disease if you dare question the perfection of their god.
malware scanner: malware (especially when offered by Facebook, q.v.).
messenger app: an inefficient messaging program where typing takes 10 times as long as on a desktop or laptop computer. Designed to dissuade you from actually calling the person.
phone: portable computing device, not used to make calls.
remote desktop: when your operating system fails, and the odds of you seeing your familiar screen are remote.
social media: media where people are antisocial.
Twitter: (a) social media with no discernible rules on who gets kicked off and why; (b) where the US president gets angry.
white balance: when racists attack people of colour but pretend they are noble and against racism.
Weibo: a website monitored by the Chinese Communist Party, where users have more freedom than on Facebook and Twitter.
Windows 10: a buggy operating system that requires 10 goes at any updates or patches, hence the name.
In amongst all the political fallout of the National Party this weekāwhat Iām dubbing (and hashtagging) ācaught in the Rossfireāāwas a series (well, over 100) Tweets from Morgan Knutson, a designer who once worked for Google. Unlike most Googlers, especially the cult-like ones who refuse to help when you point out a fault with Google, Knutson decided he would be candid and talk about his experience. And it isnāt pretty. Start here:
Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was.
I'm still pissed about the bait and switch they pulled by telling me I'd be working on Chrome, then putting me on this god forsaken piece of shit on day one.
Or, if you prefer, head to the Twitter page itself, or this Threader thread.
As anyone who follows this blog knows, Iāve long suspected things to be pretty unhealthy within Google, and it turns out that itās even worse than I expected.
A few take-outs: (a) some of the people who work there have no technical or design experience (explains a lot); (b) there’s a load of internal politics; (c) the culture is horrible but money buys a lot of silence.
Knutson claims to have received a lot of positive feedback, some in private messaging. His Tweets on the aftermath:
Iāve received a number of DMs from former and current google employees that say theyāve experienced similar things.
Bad politics, mismanagement, and back-stabbing colleagues.
This, I thought, summed it up better than I could, even though I’ve had a lot more space to do it:
This reads like a Google version of 'Chaos Monkeys': unvarnished, unblinking, just the right amount of sneering, and merciless when it comes to arrogant mediocrity and the machinery of cushy ass-kissing mixed with an un-fuck-up-able monopoly that underwrites the outlandish pay. https://t.co/PmB6zYwgZT
Those who demanded Facebook & other Silicon Valley giants censor political content – something they didn't actually want to do – are finding that content that they themselves support & like end up being repressed. That's what has happened to every censorship advocate in history: https://t.co/IZHF8GVkgC
Unlike most leftists who laughed & celebrated when Infowars was purged by Big Tech, I vehemently oppose the censorship and deletion of left-wing pages by Facebook and Twitter.
If you don't support free speech for even your most ardent adversaries, you don't support free speech.
Big Tech isnāt afraid of the law, but it is afraid of bad press that could affect its stock price. The Murdoch Press has, refreshingly, stayed on Googleās case, revealing that there had been another exposure of user data, allowing developers access to private information between 2015 and March 2018.
The company sent a memo warning executives not to disclose this, fearing āregulatory interestā.
The access was available via Google Plus, which the company says it will permanently close. In 2011 I predicted Plus would be a flop, while tech journalists salivated at the prospect, calling it, among other things, a Facebook killer. A few years later, you couldnāt find much support among the tech press, but no one admitting they were wrong.
I had warned regularly on this blog of privacy holes that I had found on Google, with inexplicable mystery parties among my Circles or on Google Buzz, as well as strange entries in my Google account. Iāve talked often about what I discovered with Googleās ad preferences (something it got away with for up to two years), but Iāve also found YouTube and search history settings turned on without my consent. Murdochs had revealed Google hacked Iphones, which led to a lawsuit. To learn that Google has had a privacy problem, one that it let slip for three years, does not surprise me one bit.
No, this isn’t my idea: Reed Allman used a version of this in his Medium post about de-Googling.
Looks like Iām not the only one writing about de-Googling, even if this piece in Medium is many years after I wrote about my efforts in 2009ā10. (Here’s an even earlier one.)
It does mean that others are becoming warier of Googleās privacy intrusions, if itās now a mainstream issue. Reed Allmanās piece is very good, and it was interesting to see that it took him 36 days and upward of US$1,500 to get free of Googleās clutches. Iām sure it can be done for less with some judicious use of certain services. It’s far better having it all in one place (unlike my documenting nearly a decade ago), and his guide is bang up to date.
I will recommend Zoho ahead of others as a Gmail alternative, only because of personal experience and Zohoās excellent customer service. I havenāt used Zohoās office programs but I assume they are the equal of Google Docs et al.
He does conclude that he didnāt feel others were convinced about following suit, which is sometimes how I feel when these warnings fall on deaf ears. (And youāve already heard me go on about other Big Tech players elsewhere.)
Above: I must report and block dozens of Instagram accounts a day, not unlike getting over the 200-a-day mark on Facebook in 2014.
For the last few days, I made my Twitter private. It was the only time in 11 years of being on the service where I felt I needed that level of privacy; I only made things public again when I realized that I couldnāt actually contact people who werenāt already following me.
However, it was relatively blissful. Accounts with automated following scripts were blocked as I had to approve them manually. I had far fewer notifications. And I only heard directly back from people I liked.
It actually reminded me of the āold daysā. Itās why Mastodon appeals: since there were only a million people on there at the end of last year, it felt like Twitter of old (even if it has already descended far enough for actor Wil Wheaton to get abused, compelling him to leave).
The quieter few days also got me thinking: I had far more business success prior to social media. I was blogging at Beyond Branding, and that was a pretty good outlet. I emailed friends and corresponded like pen pals. Those werenāt fleeting friendships where the other party could just ālikeā what you said. If I really think about it, social media have done very little in terms of my business.
Iām not saying that social media donāt have a purposeāa viral Tweet that might get quoted in the press could be useful, I supposeābut I really didnāt need them to be happy in my work and my everyday life.
Since giving up updating my Facebook wall in 2017, I havenāt missed telling everyone about what Iām up to, because I figured that the people who needed to know would know. Twitter remained a useful outlet because there are some people on there whose interactions I truly value, but as you can surmise from what I said above, the number of notifications didnāt matter to me. I donāt need the same dopamine hit that others do when someone likes or re-Tweets something of theirs.
Interestingly, during this time, I logged into Whatsapp, an app I load once every three months or so since I have a few friends on it. I saw a video sent to me by Stefan Engeseth:
When I look at my Instagram stats, theyāre back to around 2015 levels, and with these current trends, my usage will drop even further as we head into 2019.
And I really donāt mind. The video shows just why social media arenāt what theyāre cracked up to be, and why they arenāt ultimately healthy for us.
I can add the following, that many of you who read this blog know: Facebook is full of bots, with false claims about their audience, and engages in actual distribution of questionable invasive software, charges Iāve levelled at the company for many years, long before the world even heard of Christopher Wylie. Twitter is also full of bots but actually disapproves of services that help them identify them; they have double standards when it comes to what you can and canāt say; and, perhaps most sadly, those people who have viewpoints that are contrary to the mainstream or the majority are shat on by disorganized gangs of Tweeters. Thatās not liberty. Instagram is also full of botsālike when I was on Facebook, when I reported dozens to hundreds of bots a dayāand there seems to be no end to them; it also lies when it talks about how its advertising works. Given all of these problems, why would I provide these services with my precious time?
I engage with these social media in more and more limited fashion and I wouldnāt be surprised if Iām completely away from these big tech names in due course.
Itās not as though young people are active on them, so the idea that they are services where you can get the next generation of customers is bogus. If you say youāre on Facebook, you might be considered an old-timer now. I asked a Year 11 student here on work experience what he used. Facebook wasnāt one of them. He said most of his friends Snapchatted, while he was in to Reddit. He didnāt like Facebook because it wasnāt real, and we have a generation who can spot the BS and the conceit behind it.
It does make the need for services such as Duck Duck Go even greater, for us to get unbiased information not filtered by Googleās love of big corporations, in its quest to rid the web of its once meritorious nature. Google is all about being evil.
As we near the 2020s, a decade which we hope will be more caring and just than the ones before, itās my hope that we can restore merit to the system and that we find more ethical alternatives to the big names. I canāt see as great a need to show off fake lives on social media when itās much more gratifying, for me at least, to return to what I did at the beginning of the century and let the work speak for itself.
The Associated Press had an exclusive this week: Google does not obey your opt-out preferences.
I could have told you that in 2011. Oh wait, I did. And I pointed out other instances where Google ignored your request to pause your history, continuing to track you either through its main site or its properties such as YouTube.
This latest story related to Google tracking peopleās movements on their Android phones.
The AP found that Google lies: what it claims Location History does on its website is not what it actually does.
In 2011, I proved that Google lied about its Ads Preferences Manager (no, it doesn’t use apostrophes): it said one thing on its website and did another. In 2014 and 2015 I showed Google lied about what it would do with your search histories. Instagram does that these days with its advertising preferences, saying you can control them via Facebook when, in fact, it stores another set altogether which you have no control over. If I get time I’ll post my proof. It makes you wonder if the same dishonest programmers are running things, or whether itās part of Big Techās culture to lie.
This is nothing new: they all lie, especially about unwanted surveillance, and have been doing so for a long time. Itās just that mainstream media are finally waking up to it.
The EU gets it when it comes to fines. Rather than the paltry US$17 million certain US statesā attorneys-general stung Google with some years ago for hacking Iphones, theyāve now fined the search engine giant ā¬4,340 million, on top of its earlier fine of ā¬2,420 million over anticompetitive behaviour.
That US$17 million, I mentioned at the time, amounted to a few hoursā income at Google.
As the EUās competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager noted on Twitter, āFine of ā¬4,34 bn to @Google for 3 types of illegal restrictions on the use of Android. In this way it has cemented the dominance of its search engine. Denying rivals a chance to innovate and compete on the merits. Itās illegal under EU antitrust rules. @Google now has to stop itā.
Google forces manufacturers to preinstall Chrome if they want to install Google Play. The EU also notes that virtually all Android devices have Google Search preinstalled, and most users never download competing apps, furthering Googleās dominance of search. Google pays manufacturers and cellphone networks to preinstall the Google search app on their phones, and prevented manufacturers from installing Google apps if their versions of Android were not approved by Google. DuckDuckGo, my search engine of choice, welcomed the decision. It noted:
Up until just last year, it was impossible to add DuckDuckGo to Chrome on Android, and it is still impossible on Chrome on iOS. We are also not included in the default list of search options like we are in Safari, even though we are among the top search engines in many countries.
Their anti-competitive search behavior isn't limited to Android. Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they'd like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension.
Thatās consumer confusion on top of restrictive contracts that promote market dominance and anti-competitive behaviour.
This is a very petty company, one that shut down Vivaldiās Adwords accountafter its CEO gave some interviews about privacy.
Of course Iām biased, and I make no apology for itāand anyone who has followed my journey on this blog from being a Google fan to a Google-sceptic over the last decade and a half will know just how Googleās own misleading and deceptive conduct helped changed my mind.
Googleās argument, that many Android manufacturers installed rival apps, clearly fell on deaf ears, and understandably so. While Iām sure Android experts can think up examples, as a regular person who occasionally looks at phones, even those ones with rival apps still ship with the Google ones. In other words, thereās simply more bloat. Iāve yet to see one in this country ship without a Chrome default and Google Play installed, often in such a way that you canāt delete it, and Google Services, without getting your phone rooted.
I did read this in the Murdoch Press and thought it was a bit of a laugh, but then maybe my own experience isnāt typical:
The impact of any changes mandated by the EU decision on Googleās ability to target ads to usersāand to its profitabilityāis an open question. The two apps targeted in the EU decision, Googleās search and its Chrome browser, are extremely popular in their own right. Consumers are likely to seek them out from an app store even if they werenāt preinstalled on the phone, said Tarun Pathak, an analyst at research firm Counterpoint.
I just donāt believe they would, and I made it a point to get a phone that would, happily, have neither. By buying a Chinese Android phone, I escape Googleās tracking; by seeking out the Firefox browser, I get to surf the way I want. That choice is going to create competition, something that Google is worried about. The Wall Street Journal also states that despite the earlier fine, Googleās shopping rivals said little or nothing has actually happened.
With all of Googleās misdeeds uncovered on this blog over the years, Iām really not surprised.
The EU is, at the very least, forcing some to examine just how intrusive Google is. It might soon discover how uncooperative Google can be.
As my final post on Google Plus, I posted 
