Tag: content

Would You Pay For An Ad-free Internet? I Would. And Some Other Thoughts On Noise.

This is not the first time I’ve ruminated about ad block. But it’s on my mind today.

I can’t remember when one of my savviest of tech savvy friends turned me onto ad block software, but it was a watershed moment; I immediately installed it on everything I own and never looked back. I’ve changed the specific program over the years (originally it was the classic Ad Block, though these days I favor uBlock), but regardless of the specific program, it’s always the same goal. I want a clean, minimalist, distraction-free browsing experience.

In fact, I didn’t realize how bad advertising clutter had gotten until I borrowed a co-worker’s terminal to cover her service point (public library term, basically, an information desk) and used a browser without ad block.

I am not exaggerating when I say that it felt unusable. Videos started autoplaying, forcing me to choose between keeping the sound muted and being able to hear important alert notices and phone calls through our call routing software. Things crawled and slid and demanded that I interact with them in some way to get them out of the content. Worst of all was the ads that seemed intentionally built to create an accidental click; trying to close it instead opened a new link to whatever product or service was being peddled. It was awful and it made me retreat to my own station with my clean, quiet, distraction-free experience.

It was a painful realization for someone who works with information professionally, but here it is; the greatest information pipeline in human history is filled mostly with garbage. Fortunately, you can put a filter on your particular tap to remove the junk, akin to using a Brita filter when you don’t trust the quality of the local water.

I actually have a strong feeling of revulsion to most forms of advertising. I hate it. I hate the noise that it represents.

When I was a kid, the television (televisions, really) was the electronic hearth around which life revolved. As far as I can remember, the television was on. My parents watched it. My brother and I watched it. We all watched it. Even if no one was watching it, the television was usually on, as something to be “listened to” or even just as “background noise.”

Our first computer was located in the kitchen/breakfast table area. There was a television in this room, too. I recall when I started to write, when I wrote my first complete manuscript for a terrible fantasy novel, I learned to tune out the noise around me with what felt like superhuman focus. But there was always so much noise.

I haven’t had cable television in my life in probably ten years. This was never done as some sort of act of defiance; I never made the decision to become a “cord cutter.” The rise of digital delivery, a la carte downloading, and other services created a much more powerful incentive for the consumption of content. The fact that it was ad free (because I was either paying for the individual episodes or for the subscription service itself) was just a bonus.

This is how it’s been for so long that I forgot how noisy the rest of the world is.

I came to realize how much noise I’d filtered out when I went back to Tucson to visit my family earlier this year and spent a few days at my brother’s house and then a few at my mother’s. Once again, cable television with all its commercials, all its ads, all its noise, was back in my life. Even at my mom’s place, with her candles, crystals, peaceful demeanor, and adorably ancient cat . . . there was still the television and the noise.

It was a powerful lesson in how noisy life is and how much energy we spend ignoring it. Because make no mistake, even if you don’t consciously notice the noise, even if you can tune it out with superhuman focus as I did, your body is still experiencing it. Your ears are taking in the sound waves and your brain is filtering through the massive amount of data it ingests to prioritize what it believes to be the most important bits and so much exposure to this barrage of junk sound mean it all gets chucked into the spam folder . . . but that doesn’t mean it’s not still being ingested.

I resent it. I resent the bandwidth advertising consumes. I despise the cognitive tricks that are deployed to co-opt my reason and manipulate my emotions. I know enough to know that I’m not immune to these techniques; that they are crafted by people who devote their considerable intelligence to this purpose. I am not immune; thinking otherwise simply means you’re easier to manipulate.

I treasure silence. It’s hilariously stereotypical, considering my profession, but there it is.

Let’s return to the Internet and all its mental noise.

I understand why ads exist. I know that everything we do online has a cost and if I’m not paying for a service or product directly, it’s because I am the product. Ads are the price of admission. It’s the model that we’ve gotten used to. But it’s one that I’m sick of. I’m so sick of it that I pay money to keep ads off my site, because I don’t want anything I do to  help contribute to that flood of noise. It’s worth it to me.

I don’t think content should be free. Content has value and content creators should be compensated for their time and effort.

Many sites are switching to subscription models or donations or other options to pay for premium, ad-free experiences. And this is a good step, but it’s so fractured, so disjointed, that it wasn’t until I started seriously doing personal budgeting that I realized how many different goddamn subscriptions were sipping away at my finances. Things I’d used and forgotten to cancel. Things I used a few times a year. So many things. It’s too much mental bandwidth to responsibly manage all of those things, to do the mental math of deciding each and every time “how much did I use this site or that site this much? How much was this worth to me.”

The model I would use would be similar to my current cell provider, Ting. Each month, I use a certain amount of data and text messages. There’s a neat little meter that tracks it on my account. At the end of the billing cycle, they say “you used this much data,  you owe us this much.” And I pay that amount. You might also recognize this model as the one you get through your electric bill or your water bill or almost any other utility.

Websites already track your shit. All those cookies we mindlessly agree to are little troves of data to be bundled up, packaged, and sold, so that the commercial engine of the Internet continues to turn. Again, there is nothing on the web that is free. If you’re not paying for a product, you are the product, or more accurately, your information is or your viewership or whatever other metric advertisers are measuring.

So that’s what I want: a meter that tracks how much I view each site each month and then calculates a value and from that total bill, pays out whatever dividends my consumption of that content would have represented in terms of ad dollars. I want it manageable from one central location, instead of having forty different subscriptions charging me a dollar each.

I recognize that this model may not be possible right now. Who decides how much each site is worth? What if one site decides it costs me five dollars per page and another says it’s 10 cents? It obviously would require an entire paradigm shift and at the core, what I’m really saying is that I want to pay more money than I already do.

Because, let’s be honest; the current model is actually fine for me. I block the ads, I get the content, the cost of having me as a viewer is subsidized by all the people who aren’t blocking ads. In fact, it’s better for me if ad block never goes mainstream, because if too many people start using it, it will fail for everyone. Content providers will see their revenue dry up and then something must be done. I already have noticed an uptick in the number of sites that just flat-out deny access if you have ad block running.

But this does not feel ethical or right. This idea shows up in philosophy a lot. Kant’s categorical imperative and the prisoner’s dilemma come to mind as possible examples.

So there we are. I’m an Internet parasite. I’d like to change. But currently it’s not easy enough or rewarding enough to do so, so I don’t.

2015 Blog Retrospective

As another year comes to a close, I find that it’s fun to look back and see how things have gone for the blog over the past year. Overall, I’m really pleased; traffic has continued to increase at a steady pace and I’ve received enough comments from people to convince me that not all of the traffic is spam robots.

My post output has been reduced considerably compared to previous years, which sort of fun to puzzle over; more people are reading less content! Is that a thing to be proud of?

The problem is that posts don’t equate for all of my online footprint. If you take a look at my Goodreads page (perhaps through the helpful widget on the right siderbar!) you’ll notice that I’ve been writing reviews for the books I read. Time was I used to read a book, slap a star-rating on it, and go on my merry way with nary a grunt. About two years ago, someone pointed out that they were really curious why I’d rate a book with whatever rating I happened to give it, so I started actually writing my thoughts out.

The reviews tend to be shorter than blog posts, but since I read pretty quickly, there are a lot of them. So while blog post content is down, I think that’s because my output shifted to a source outside of this site. I’ve considered linking WordPress to Goodreads so that reviews would get posted here, but thus far I’ve resisted for the same reason that I don’t tweet my Goodreads links anymore; it feels annoying and spam-y to me. The content is there if you’re interested; no need to plaster it everywhere.

Which is an attitude that I realize makes me doomed in the evolving ecosystem of the Internet (see previous post about online advertising and ad block).

Finally, there were less posts this year because I’ve actually been writing my novel again! Between the experiment with giving my book away for free (and actually getting a bit of money for it, whee!) and the new project that really has my attention, there’s actually been a huge increase in my word ouput. It’s just in a place that no one gets to see right now, except for me and my spreadsheet.

So that’s what I’ve been doing over the past year. I realize it’s made this blog somewhat of a lonely place, but it’s been infinitely better for my head. I haven’t felt the urge to write a post just to write a post about something, which usually meant seeking out a topic that made me angry enough to have thoughts about it. It’s made for a more harmonious life. And really, we don’t need one more blog by a straight white guy on the Internet talking about things that make him angry. There are a lot of those already.

So instead I focus on my book, because my research has shown me that we really do need more books where people ride dinosaurs into battle and kill each other with them. Because dinosaurs are awesome.

I Feel Bad About Running An Adblock But I Can’t Stop

Bloggers tend to have a complicated relationship with advertisements. For professional bloggers (i.e. those who make a living off this sort of thing), that’s the lifeblood of their profession. In fact, I’d go as far to say advertising is what’s created the Internet as we know it today (well, technically, the World Wide Web, but nobody seems to use that term anymore).

We expect to get content for free these days, but we also expect it to be of a professional quality. The days of some dude’s crappy Geocities page being the only source of information are long over; now, you can peruse hundreds of blogs written by people that, in a different decade, would be reporters for actual newspapers and the like. And advertising is what makes that happen.

And then there are the ad blockers. A brief description for the non-tech readers: an ad blocker is an app you can install, typically directly into your browser. It will scan the content of each page that you access and it will disable the various ads, pop-ups, sponsored content links, and other stuff that websites use to generate advertising revenue. The end result is that each page is decluttered from all the extra stuff that gets stuffed in there and it creates a cleaner, more enjoyable browsing experience.

For the user, there is no real downside. For content creators, however, there’s a huge downside, in that websites earn money by how often those ads they display are viewed and if people are blocking the ads, they’re not getting the page views, which means earning less money. It’s not a big loss if only a few people do it, but if enough users are blocking the ads, it can really hurt the content creator.

Aside from that, there’s a moral dimension as well: those ads are how creators get paid for their work. By blocking the ads, you’re getting the content for free, or at least, you’re not contributing to the creator getting paid. Is that stealing? You could make an argument that way. Certainly, I feel bad for using it. I feel like I’m taking advantage of the system.

Some creators get around it by moving to a subscription-based model; for a small fee, you get an ad-free experience and maybe some addition perks. For most people, there a likely a few sites that they use heavily enough where this is possible, but certainly not all of them; there’s just too much content out there.

Recently, I tried turning off my ab block to see if I could get by without it. The price of good content is a few ads, I told myself. After a week of browsing without an ad block, I was in a hurry to reactivate it.

It isn’t just that the ads are annoying or for things I don’t care about. They’re actively harmful to my experience on the site. The human eye is drawn to movement and so while I’d be trying to focus on reading a page, the videos would play or pictures would shift, and every time it happened, my concentration was broken for a moment as my gaze shifted to the thing. Not to mention the sheer visual clutter for most pages.

Compare that to the clean, quiet space created by an ad block and you’ll see why, regardless of feeling bad about using it, I was in a hurry to go back.

I don’t have a solution to the problem. It’s just something that I’m thinking about right now.

And for what it’s worth, I pay WordPress a small fee each year to keep ads off my site, so you’ll have an ad free experience here regardless if you use ad block or not. But I’m also a hobbyist blogger who doesn’t depend on the success of this site to eat, so it’s hardly a fair comparison.

Destiny, Or, How To Make People Hate Your Video Game

If you’re not a gamer, skip this post. Everyone else, brace yourselves: I’m about to go full nerd for a while. Thigns are going to get pretty “Inside Baseball” here.

I started playing Destiny back in December, right around the time that I got my Xbox One (I waited for that price drop, yo). I liked the gameplay a lot, although once I finished the main storyline, I felt like there was a pretty intense roadblock keeping me from doing anything else with it. The end game content just required too much work to jump onto the loot treadmill of “get better gear, so you can do the thing to get better gear.” Don’t get me wrong, I like shiny purps as much as the next gamer, but I’m also a lazy gamer. I’ll do the thing to get the thing only as long as it’s actually amusing. The moment that the epics require gameplay behavior that feels like actual work? Fuck that, I’m out.

But then an expansion pack came out and I was all, “ooo, new stuck to do!” In many games, the launch of an expansion pack is the best time to jump in, especially for massively multiplayer or persistent shared world environments. The expansion pack evens out the community again since everyone has new things to complete before returning to the end game and the content always has to be created in such a way that people who didn’t get all the end game epic gear can still complete it. So, even though I was a little surprised at a $20 price point, I purchased the first Destiny expansion The Dark Below. At the time, I decided that it wasn’t that bad, since most MMO expansions (looking at you, WoW) cost $40 but usually deliver enough content to make it worthwhile.

But after burning through all of the content in a single afternoon, I began to worry. After I poked around online, I noticed something even more worrisome; mainly, that I was basically a second class citizen for playing the game on Xbox rather than PlayStation:

Yep, Sony’s snagged themselves yet another Destiny exclusive: one of The Dark Below‘s strike missions—you know, the ones where you and two other players go through quasi-dungeons and take on powerful bosses—is only for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. Bungie says the exclusive is until “at least” fall of 2015, which means that for the next year at a minimum, Xbox players will miss out on a large chunk of The Dark Below.

That’s on top of the already-PlayStation-exclusive Dust Palace strike, so if you’re keeping track, by the second week of December, PlayStation owners will have eight strikes while Xbox players only have six. Of course, it’s been clear for months now that Bungie has firmly sided with Sony in the battle for your living room, but that hasn’t stopped Xbox fans from feeling ripped off. How can you blame them? They’re paying the same amount of money as PlayStation players, yet getting less stuff.

Wait, there’s another strike that I’d never even seen? Because I bought an Xbox rather than a PlayStation? Well . . . that doesn’t make me feel very good. I suppose that if The Dark Below was full of things to do, it wouldn’t have stung so much, but once again, I ran into the treadmill problem. I didn’t need to see all of the things in the game; I like that challenges exist in the forms of raids and other end game content for players that really want to put that effort in. But this is an old problem: hardcores vs. casuals. I’ve been on both sides of that divide, so I understand. But I’m not asking for content to be available for everyone. I just want something to do other than repeating the missions and tiny number of strikes I’ve already done.

Eventually, without any content that felt meaningful at my level and no way to increase my level without grinding (i.e. turning the game into work), I gave up and moved on to something else.

But then another expansion pack came out! And this one had some good (if not great) reviews and had content for everyone and there would even be a chance for me to get some of the really cool stuff. So I bought the next expansion, House of Wolves, once again at $20, and gave it a shot. Still felt really expensive, especially considering how little content was available in the previous expansion, but I was willing to forgive and forget. And you know what, they were right! I was able to snag an exotic pulse rifle that was really fun to use and I finally managed to equip my Warlock with some fancy looking gear and although I’m still not doing end game raiding, I’m feeling pretty good about myself. I’m so glad. Things feel good. I feel good about my time investment and I’m having fun.

And now . . . there’s this:

Why Destiny Players Feel Screwed Over

Destiny Director Defends $40 Price Tag For New Expansion

Disastrous Interview Could Have Ramifications for Destiny

From the Forbes article:

Tom Phillips, the interviewer, sets out with two missions in mind. To understand why players who want the bonus content of theTaken King Collector’s Edition, new emotes and cosmetic items, have to rebuy content they already have, namely the base game and original DLC, in a pack which retails for $80 in the states. The second question is what exactly The Taken King contains where it’s worth a full $40, a very hefty price for DLC, and even for a full expansion in some players’ eyes.

What follows is Luke Smith doing everything possible to fumble the answers to both of these questions. I highly suggest you read the entire interview because from start to finish, it’s kind of astonishing how tone deaf every aspect of it is.

Without copying and pasting the entire thing, the long and short of it is that Smith can’t announce any new plans for players to get this extra content without rebuying things they already own, and he acts like he doesn’t understand why this is a big deal.

“It’s about value,” he says. “The player’s assessment of the value of the content.”

If you didn’t, I strongly encourage you to read the interview. It’s really the only way to get why this is so irritating.

Here’s the thing: I don’t give a shit about bonus content. I’ve gotten to the point in my life where I have enough things to keep me from doing things I actually should be doing, so I don’t need to be a completionist anymore to feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth. I don’t have to master every character; I can just play as Reptile for three hundred matches in Mortal Kombat X and call it a day. I can play Heroes of the Storm with the three characters I unlocked for free and have fun. I don’t need all of the things. This Destiny bonus content isn’t for me and I’ll never buy it, in any form.

But I hate the idea of a model that wants its most dedicated fans to pay for content they’ve already purchased. It’s insulting. It’s humiliating. It’s wrong. It’s every bit the Scientology model of “get the sucker to pay more money, so that he’ll keep paying even more money.”

Bonus content like this, especially stuff that’s entirely cosmetic in nature, shouldn’t be used as a reason to tell someone “you will throw money at the screen.” If anything, this is the kind of thing that a player unlocks for being loyal. “Hey, thanks for playing our game for a year. Here’s a neat thing!”

There are updates to the article that say “we’ll be releasing information about what veteran players will be getting and don’t worry, it’s very cool,” but I really think the damage has already been done. You literally have your creative director out there saying that the model you prefer is “pay for content twice.”

Here’s why I’m feeling sad about my time and money spent thus far, summed up perfectly by a very eloquent Reddit post:

ReclaimerSpirit 1058 points 1 day ago*

I normally just lurk this sub but I needed to get this out there.

Reading this interview didn’t just make me not want to buy the expansion, it made me feel really shitty. I feel like I’m being laughed at, like I was a sucker for buying Destiny – a game I’ve really enjoyed and hyped to all of my friends before launch (EDIT: should note that this is the only game I have EVER pre-ordered). The way Smith talks about the player makes me feel small and disposable, like he owns me and I’m going to buy the new DLC no matter what because I’m just a sucker. I’m not the player. I am the sucker, and I will just throw money at the screen because I’m told to.

Bungie, this is part of your game experience. Seeing one of your staff say things that make me feel like I’ve been duped into playing your game makes me not want to play. You’ve done a really good job in the past of listening to your fans and, more importantly, having fun with them. We used to be on the same side – that’s how things like Red vs. Blue and Forge mode came about. What happened?

To quote an old Penny Arcade strip: “the filthy pigs will rush to our trough!”

This whole thing makes me regret the time I’ve spent with the game, in a way that I never did with World of WarCraft or other MMOs. See, there’s this weird thing that happens in the life cycle of a typical MMO or persistent world game; after the player moves out of the enamored phase, it’s common that he or she begins questioning the time spent on the game. Eventually, when the player is no longer having fun, the feeling is that all of the time the player spent on the game was a huge waste, because it’s no longer continually providing enjoyment. Thus, the player burns out, convinced that it was all a waste.

I’ve seen that happen constantly and I’ve tried to always be mindful of it. The fact that I don’t play WoW now does not mean I didn’t have fun when I was playing it. I didn’t waste my time playing it. The idea that if I hadn’t been playing WoW, I would be doing something wonderful and productive is just false. That was my leisure time that I spent; if I hadn’t been doing that, I’d have been playing something else. Or watching Netflix. Whatever.

But this goes beyond the typical life cycle angst. This debacle really does make me feel like I was wrong to have spent my time this way. That’s a terrible thing to do in an industry where making people feel good is your sole directive. It’s a terrible thing and it’s also an impressive thing, to achieve such destruction outside of the gamespace itself.

Destiny really could use some good news right now, since the story is blowing up all over the place. Fortunately, we have this bit of information to smooth things over: New Destiny Quest Is Exclusive To Red Bull:

Activision Publishing, Inc. and Bungie, together with energy drink category leader Red Bull today announced a partnership that will bring an epic new quest to players of the popular sci-fi action adventure game franchise Destiny via custom-designed Red Bull® Energy Drink cans, inviting consumers across the United States and Canada to Become Legend, making this the first time a video-game, or any third party brand, has ever appeared on the iconic Red Bull can.

Access to the quest will be available on specially-marked cans of Red Bull and leverage themes of speed, tenacity and strategy inspired by the energy drink, throughwww.RedBullQuest.com. Each Red Bull can will also include bonus XP to help players prepare for this epic quest. Players can start using the bonus XP throughout the summer, with the in-game quest kicking off following the launch of The Taken King, the latest addition to the Destiny universe scheduled for release on September 15, 2015.

Wow. Just . . . fucking. Wow. I actually triple-checked the date on that article when I saw it, just to make sure it wasn’t something that had been posted on April 1st.

So . . . how about that damage control, huh? Play Destiny! Buy content twice because we think you’re suckers! Buy Red Bull! THROW YOUR MONEY AT THE SCREEN!”

I miss the old model: “here is a game. Pay money and play it. Buy a tie-in product like a novel or comic book if you really love it.”

Community isn’t just a marketing buzzword for games like this; they’re part of the ecosystem, part of the experience. It’s not just a way to keep playing; it’s why most of them are playing in the first place.