I hate you all

You may have noticed that I’m posting less frequently lately.  (Ignore the fact that I’ve posted three times in the last week, and look at the whole month without a post before that…)  The reason for this is fairly simple: I’m using the computer less.

The computer, for many years, has been my refuge.  I’ve used it for everything, from games through research and study to productivity.  I can (and have) created web sites, books, ‘artistic’ images, programs, etc., and I have spent countless years surfing the web, or playing games.

Now, though…  Well, decent games for the PC are rare, and when they do release a decent game, you can only play it if you install some form of DRM, too.  (DRM = Digital Rights Management system)  I have no major problems with software companies wanting to prevent piracy, I understand it – but not when it comes at the cost they expect us to bear!

ALL DRM software requires you to register yourself with them, then register the game.  And once a game is registered, you cannot sell it.  And the DRM has the right to disable the game, too.  So you buy the game; get annoyed at being killed at the same point every single time and decide to cheat; cheat; and find that the cheat you used is classed as an ‘illegal modification’ of the software – so they disable the game.

Yeah.  You don’t own the game when you buy it – you own the right to play the game provided you play it exactly how ‘they’ say you will play it.  Or they’ll take their ball back and leave you standing alone in the middle of the empty field.

So, games are no longer available to me.  What about the internet?  Well, it seems that half of all websites now have adopted the ‘annoy the hell out visitors’ policy.  I’m talking about ‘pop-ups,’ of course.

You don’t know what I mean?  You’ve not seen one?  Yes, you have, I guarantee it. 

I’m going to do something I don’t normally do – I’m going to ask you to visit a couple of websites.  We’ll start with ebay.  (If you are already a user of ebay, this next bit will probably not work for you – as you’ve already been through it.)

Go to ebay.co.uk, and in the menu on the left of the page, select ‘Electronics.’  After the page changes, select Computers/Tablets/Networks and wait, then select Laptops and netbooks.  (Yes, there is a quicker way of doing it, but some of my readers won’t understand it.)  You are now looking at a list of laptops that are available.  If you look just above the list, on the right, you will see that it says ‘Sort by:’ followed by a drop-down selection box that contains ‘Best Match.’  Click on this drop-down, and change it to ‘Price + P&P: lowest first.’  You now have a pop-up, that asks for your postcode.

Silly of me, but this annoys me.  I’m looking at a UK site.  I’m interested in goods IN THE UK.  Since when did you have to pay a different postage rate in different parts of the UK?

But that’s beside the point.  The point here is to demonstrate a pop-up.  I now see them on more sites than not.  They are there for various ‘reasons’ ranging from showing the contents of your ‘shopping basket’ to asking you to take part in a survey.  Almost all of them, however, are there for the same purpose: to get your data, or to advertise a product.

Prior to making this post, I turned on the computer to perform a few simple tasks: check for email on two accounts, check what todays ‘deal of the day’ is for Kindle, and try to find a cheat for a game.  Within five minutes of starting (no exageration there) I was so annoyed at the number of pop-ups that I decided to see if I could find a way to stop them.

So I looked them up, and found the second website I’m going to ask you to look at.  http://popup-toolkit.com/

This is a site selling a toolkit for making the pop-ups, and you immediately see the worst kind: a box that bounces around and insists on getting your attention.  The page is a testament to bad design, and lack of moral or ethical values.

I won’t ask you to read the whole thing, but…  The very start of the real text is a set of bullet points. 

• Have you felt the need to advertise your products and at the same time make the advertisement a pleasant experience for your visitors?
• Have you thought of a really enjoyable way of expressing your offers to the users and thus increase multiple times your sales, your subscribers, your commissions and your PROFITS?
• Have you ever asked yourself “Is there a way to present my products and services in a likable way from the user’s point of view?”

OK, sounds good.  If I was trying to sell a product on my webpage, I would want visitors to my site to like what I do.    Now, look just a little bit further down the page, to where it tells you the ‘Main features shown in examples follow:’  (Sorry about the grammar, but that’s the way they’ve written it.)

Look at those features.  Look how they stress the fact that these pop-ups are ‘fully unblockable.’   How ‘The new Intelligent Heuristic Algorithm will Open the Unblockable DHTML Popup JUST when the visitor is trying to leave your web site.’

So the pop-ups come at exactly the point when a site visitor has decided they’ve had enough:  When you try to leave the website – up comes screen with another advert, or asking you why you’re leaving, or just to tell you to never come back.

Well, they don’t have to tell me.  Every time I go online, I add another website to the list of those to avoid.  Sadly, though, I can’t avoid them all – because my email service, Amazon, and my bank all use them.

Which leaves me with only one course of action.  Stop using the internet.  And if I stop using the internet, I can’t blog.  Which is why I haven’t posted so frequently.

It’s sad, really.  The internet was started by enthusiasts.  Anybody could join in, anybody could create a website about anything.  And we paid to do it.  We paid for the network, we paid for the internet to be built.

And then the businesses moved in.

Now, the businesses are complaining that the internet we paid for, for our purposes, is not fast enough or ‘big’ enough for all their adverts!

A few years ago, I played a thing called ‘Second Life.’  It was great: it was a wide open world, where you could own virtual land and build whatever you wanted on it.  You could create literally anything in the world.  And it was a world – without limits.  You could fly.  You could walk, dance, drive…   There was an economy.  I sold my own designs, I bought goods from other players, I had a job which paid well.  The currency used in the game could be traded for real money, which was part of the downfall…

Because businesses noticed the number of ‘customers’ available, and moved in.  I remember a conversation with a businessman I met, one of the first to establish a presence.  He said ‘things will have to change now that businesses are getting interested.’  I told him that those ‘changes’ would drive most customers away – but he didn’t care, as long as he could make money off the ones that were left.

And that’s the problem.  We now have an internet where ‘business’ is more important than me, you, or the cat. 

As long as we accept our place at the bottom of the food chain, all will be well.  And I’m tired of being the only one fighting it.

I started using the internet some fifteen to twenty years ago, and it was a lot of fun.  It was interesting, and – most of all – it was useful.

Whatever the topic, I could – and did – quickly find the answer to almost any question I was asked.  I taught new computer owners how to use the internet – I sold computers after demonstrating the internet. 

All I had to do was ask the client what they were interested in, type it into a search engine, and within minutes show them websites containing information about their subject. 

The last time I tried to teach somebody how to use the internet, I spent half my time saying ‘oh, ignore that’ while I removed something that had popped up on screen.  It is now impossible to spend more than five minutes surfing the web without at least one unwanted window getting in the way.

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