Hey Heather, it's me again.
* I’m going through some old drafts that have been laying around and polluting my directory. I’ll be reviewing and posting some of them.
tl;dr: this is a rant.
Is it me or is every website out there the worst? Everywhere you go: pop-up here! Sign up there! DO YOU LIKE COOKIES?! WE’VE GOT ‘EM! And now, so do you.
No one is enjoying this. This isn’t fun.
The internet has become a giant mall. Giant photos and CTAs everywhere.
SALE! SALE! SALE!
Protip: always read ‘sale’ signs in french.
While malls have their sometimes headless, sometimes legless, always bountiful fiberglass effigies of modern humans mocking those of us who prefer taste over feel, websites have knowledge. Or is it data? Either way it’s not what YOU’RE looking for, it’s what they TAKE. And in exchange, what do you get? A recipe for a homemade cleaner and the loss of privacy. I’m not sure that’s good housekeeping.
But don’t worry, the LAW will save us. Let’s start by making things ADA compliant, and follow WCAG… No? They won’t huh. Too expensive they said? Do they know what ADA means? And they’re still not following it? But that’s illegal! Btw what do you think costs more: building for compliance or a lawsuit for non-compliance?
What if we try something else? Like a new rule. Oh Europe did. With GDPR. And that’s why we have all those pop-ups using dark patterns, guiding us to click “yes, cookie please”. Hm. And what about the sites that don’t even let me choose ‘NOOO’? Is that illegal.. err.. depending on where I am you say. Hm.
And this is the best we can do? To contaminate almost every website with these “can i givz u cookiz, plz? 🥺”
But the sites are functional, right? With all that money coming in from targeted ads, they can at least make the sites usable. Grey text on white background, you say. How is that a thing?! Is anyone even reading anymore.
I don’t understand why everything is like this. I must be in an echo chamber because I can’t seem to find anyone that condones this.
So what now, what do we do? Fix it, eh. Yeah, I’ll keep trying. In the meantime we can just hang out, unless you wanna go to the mall, I hear it’s empty. No? Thank goodness. We could just hang around on Marginalia and go through random sites, that seems better.
Or maybe, we can try to figure out where to watch more of this 1986 PBS hit.