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The Guardian, Google and advertising Revenue

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

For a reasonable amount of time I would check all of the news websites on a daily basis. These include The Guardian, the Independent, BBC news and french news sources. In so doing I was kept up to date with current affairs. Certain websites, such as the NYtimes and Le Temps were hidden behind paywalls so there was not much to see from such sites. At the time I went directly to the websites, without following hyperlinks. I saw the adverts and publishers got their revenue direct from my personal visit to their website.

Many newspapers, broadcasters and other media outlets are currently fighting to remain relevant. They are restructuring, they are dumbing down their content and they are reducing staff numbers.

The announcement comes after a difficult year for the newspaper industry as huge digital firms such as Google and Facebook take the lion’s share of advertising budgets while the growth of mobile proves harder to monetise than print for news organisations.

Source

As an avid consumer of news content through news websites, podcasts, documentaries, radio and books I see the shift away from newspapers not as a result of Google and Facebook but rather as a result of poor editorial integrity. When I go to a news source I want facts to be presented in a serious and informational manner. I want article headlines to tell me what the article is about without being told how I should feel about it. The Guardian has a news website that I visited every single day for years. The same is the same of the Independent, the BBC and other news sources. I read articles and I compared the stance to form an opinion on current affairs.

When newspapers shifted towards the clickbait model I stopped visiting their websites. They told me that I’d be amazed, that my life would change forever and more. That might work for a younger more impressionable audience but for readers like me it feels condescending. The experience is unpleasant.

Experience has taught me not to click on those headlines because they fail to provide me with new information. They should not assume that we can’t take five seconds to go to a reference website for context. We buy books to understand the context of current affairs and it is easy to visit wikipedia when we need to refresh our memory.

Many news organizations, facing competition from digital outlets, have sharply reduced the size of their newsrooms and their investment in news gathering.

But The New York Times has not.

We have our subscribers to thank for that.

Source

News gathering and newsrooms are the origin of a newspaper’s value. The more professional editorials are, the more they respect their audience, the more of an audience they will have. We are on facebook, Google+, Twitter and Linkedin. We live across multiple tabs and websites. When editorial teams respect us we return the favour. We become or remain loyal. When we see value we commit to become subscribers. We invest in news outlets when they show that they provide us with worthwhile information.

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On Quitting Corporate Social Media
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On Quitting Corporate Social Media

Byrichard

It’s interesting that we can stop using a website that is so integral to our lives for years. During the pandemic I quit facebook because I was flamed and trolled at a time when I needed friendship and support. Facebook has been known to make people depressed. During lockdown I decided to quit Facebook and Instagram.


Quitting FB and IG


I quit them for two reasons. The first is that I no longer got anything positive out of them. I saw plenty of junk, I felt isolated, and they were promoting things that polarised my sense of missing out. It was healthier just to quit both. I wouldn’t be reminded of my pandemic solitude if I wasn’t seeing pictures of people with their families and friends whilst I was keeping safe from COVID.


Quitting Twitter


The first time I quit, and deleted my twitter account was in 2007 or 2008, right before the RTS, at the time TSR, asked to interview me about Twitter. I recreated my account, and then stuck around for the next twelve or more years.


With Twitter I wanted an alternative forever. I disliked that the site was focused on the cult of personality, spam hashtags and people marketing and promoting, rather than conversing. I still argue about hashtags on the Fediverse, and I’m tempted to quit it, if hashtags become more important than conversations.


Morality and Noise


Twitter was usable until Musk changed the timeline to promote junk, rather than chronological tweets. People love to ask, “but how will people see my tweets if I don’t use hashtags?”. The answer is simple. Devote time to the network. If you devote time your tweets, toots, notes and more will appear more often, especially if you have conversations.


The issue with Twitter is that it lost track of the chronological timeline and tried to recommend tweets that were 24hrs old, that were popular, that would guarantee that you were ignored if you responded. This is one of my key reasons for blocking verified years ago. I didn’t want to see tweets that, if I engaged with them, would see me be ignored. That’s just noise, but it’s also emotionally draining.


Social media is not just for married people sitting on a toilet alone, killing a few minutes of solitude. For some people social media is their social life, so the more disengaged the community is, the more worthless the network. That’s why people stay on FB, and hesitate to leave Twitter. They don’t want to be alone.


Twitter swung to the Right. More and more disinformation was spread. I felt the need to be anonymous, and even to hide my tweets from public view, long before came to Twitter, but I left when I saw him doing to twitter, what made me quit Instagram. Taking over the timeline, and making it impossible to converse with the small social circle I was in the habit of talking with.


The Unique Selling Point that kept me on Twitter was lost.


The Lost Habits


Instagram


For 3400 days I posted on Instagram every day, or almost every day. I only changed my habit because the photo sharing app that I used to share images became a signal of solitude and isolation, during lockdown. Instead of feeling closer to people I felt more and more isolated. I was sharing images that were being ignored, unliked. That’s when I decided that I might as well post them to my blog instead. The rational was that if I was going to create content, I might as well be the person to benefit from it.


Facebook


For years Facebook was the network where I chatted with uni friends and colleagues. When friends and colleagues were no longer appearing in my timeline, and I was trolled and flamed by strangers, during lockdown, I quit. The sense of community was destroyed, and the allure of blogging seemed more interesting.


Twitter


I left Twitter for moral reasons. What made my emigration from Twitter to the fediverse a success was the community. The mistake that Twitter made was to drive people away when an alternative solution already existed. For once there was a critical mass of people, fleeing from Twitter, to the fediverse, for the fediverse to grab people’s attention and devotion. Interest might be a better word.


The Alternative


I have now been blogging daily for 247 days. In that time I have often shared a daily photo or more, with the blog posts. I have replaced Facebook and Instagram with blogging. The beauty of blogging is that I’m creating content for my site, practicing my writing skills, and getting used to elaborating on ideas. I have a healthy blogging routine, rather than wasting time on FB and IG.


I have replaced Twitter with the Fediverse and the advantage of the Fediverse is that you have a multitude of communities on a number of servers. This means that if you don’t like one community, you can change from one instance to another. You also have the option of writing long posts on the fediverse. You can treat it as a web forum rather than a microblogging platform. You can elaborate, and you can share essays, if you are so inclined.


On Twitter people always said “I don’t want to blog because then people have to click away from Twitter to read my post, and they won’t”. With the fediverse people don’t have to click away. Your blog can be native to the Fediverse. Mine is. If people choose to “read more” they can read the entire post, and comment without signing in.


Blogging in the fediverse is seamless.


And Finally


When I gave up on Facebook, and when I gave up on Twitter I felt that I was isolating myself more than ever, by leaving the two communities, but now, with the growth of the fediverse I feel that the opposite is true. By leaving the networks where I was competing with algorithms to be noticed, I have joined social networks where chronological timelines reward those who converse the most, rather than those that just post once a day, with a hashtag. I see plenty of people posting, sometimes with no links, no images, and no hashtags. It’s pure conversation, and I like that. That’s how social networks should be.

GPS Accuracy Contrast Between the 45s and Instinct

GPS Accuracy Contrast Between the 45s and Instinct

Byrichard

Yesterday afternoon I was looking at the GPS track for a run I did with the 45s and I was struck by how wide of the mark it was, compared to the same run with the Garmin Instinct. With the Garmin instinct the GPS track fits like a rail to the satellite and road map. With the Garmin Forerunner 45s it is quite a way out.


How Big Is The Difference?


With the Garmin Instinct GPS track you can see so precisely that you can tell which side of the road I was running on, as well as when I switched from one side to the other. The GPS track is highly aligned with the walk or run.


In contrast with the Forerunner 45 the track is a few meters it. It shows you as running through trees and buildings, instead of along the road. It’s when you zoom in that you see the flagrant difference in accuracy between the two devices.


Does It Matter?


Now that I notice the difference I don’t think that it really matters. I need to check whether when it is GPS alone or GPS and Glonass, whether it is more accurate than GPS and Magellan. I think the GPS chip is cheaper, and that’s what affects accuracy.


Working On Fitness


My reason for running is to improve my fitness, according to fitness apps, and with the Garmin Forerunner 45s I get a measure of my vo2max and how it is progressing with each run. I don’t get that data with the Instinct.


And Finally


If you want to create a GPS route for others to follow use the Garmin instinct because it will give a clear, accurate route, but if you’re just running and tracking for fun then the Forerunner 45s is fine. Sometimes the cheap option is fine.

Twitterfall

Byrichard

If you love watching trends on twitter then twitterfall is for you. It takes into account the top ten trends or so and automatically updates with the latest tweets from the whole of twitter. It’s great becaues you can see the trends in real time without following six thousand people. A mere 340 should be enough 😉

On a more serious note it’s a very useful tool. You wake up in the morning and see what are the top twitter stories of the day within a very short amount of time. It’s global of course, so depending on the timezones you may see a different emphasis.

There is a local view too. If you choose keywords, for example Tuttle you can seleect the geographic region, London for example, and you will see all tweets from that geographic location.

Blogging to the Fediverse via WordPress without Tags

Blogging to the Fediverse via WordPress without Tags

Byrichard

I noticed a drop in traffic to the blog which I would attribute to three things. The main reason is that I went from main-vision.com/richard/blog to blog.main-vision.com. This screwed up all the search engine results, despite adding the redirection order in the htaccess file.


As if that wasn’t silly enough I then redirected my blog back to its original place to see if that would revive traffic and of course I can’t tell. I can’t tell because I don’t know whether the posts I am writing now have less relevance or if the posts I am writing now are no longer showing up in results, due to the twice changed URL.


Not Using Hashtags


The other reason is that I stopped using tags in my posts. I noticed that by using tags my WordPress posts appeared on the Fediverse with hashtags which I find hideously ugly. My dislike of hashtags stems from 2007 when I saw people forget the art of conversation, for the art of using a short cut, attention wise. Hashtags.


With Jaiku, Bulletin boards, forums, Facebook and more, we have threads, and groups, and more. This allows us to have conversations that are clean and rational. With twitter it was decided that instead of threading like Jaiku had, back in 2006-2007 and Google + had after this Twitter would use hashtags. Instead of a clean tidy way of having conversations we were given something hideously ugly and inefficient and it has stuck to this day.


It annoys me because instead of having something elegant and efficient we have something that has been obsolete since the iPhone came out, and if we’re really critical, since Jaiku came into being. Jaiku was decades ahead of Twitter, and yet Twitter won. Google+ was the transformation of Jaiku, and I loved Google+, but the crowd didn’t, and neither did Google.


My Frustration


I am frustrated because it would be easy to program the Fediveres, so that hashtags are shown in an elegant and efficient manner. We could get hashtags to show up as keywords at the top or bottom of a post. We could get the Fediverse to thread, using Hashtags. Instead hashtags are just a jumble of words at the bottom of page. I wouldn’t be frustrated if I wasn’t being coerced into using them. I am coerced twice. I am coerced by the Activitypub tool for WordPress screwing up how I use tags, and by the Fediverse not wanting to make keywords more elegant than they are.


And Finally


As much as I hate hashtags I think I should continue to use tags in my wordpress blog. It might be fugly on the Fediverse but my posts are more visible. I come from the olden days, when we called web dev web mastering, and for me, to add hashtags is to spam, like white text on a white background was seen as spam, in the 90s. It goes against my moral code to use hashtags.


It isn’t that I am using them. It’s that the tools we have to share from WordPress to the Fediverse are still mediocre, and the Fediverse is still primitive. One day it will be upgraded, where threads, or key words will appear, rather than hashtags. For now we’re using a technology that should have been dumped when Twitter stopped sending SMS, over a decade ago.

Sticking with the Old or Trying New Things
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Sticking with the Old or Trying New Things

Byrichard

Yesterday I went for a half hour drive to do a favour, but in arriving where I had to do the favour I found that people were deeply focused and did not want to be interrupted so I went for a walk. I didn’t swap to the hiking shoes that were waiting patiently in the car. I wore my “recycled” shoes instead. I eventually regretted this because the ground that was frosty, also had deep puddles of water and I had to walk through them. Two or three times my feet got wet. While getting my feet wet I was also listening to a Linux Podcast, episode 56 of Linux After Dark and they were discussing whether people like to adopt a system and stick with it, or whether they like to experiment and try new things constantly.


I feel that way about watches at the moment. For plenty of people watches are like televisions. “I haven’t owned either for decades, my laptop and ipad are enough.” For years I was without a watch, and without a TV. As a student I never felt the need. It’s only because people had spare televisions that I ended up with one. I never bought one for myself.


Since I bought myself one or more raspberry pies I have been experimenting with various instances, to see how to set them up quickly, and experiment with implementation and more. In the process I am learning skills that I had not experimented with in years. One of these is to flash a USB key with a version of Linux and rebooting a PC from the USB key to run linux. It worked so well that now I am fighting the desire to install Linux over Windows and have the windows machine become a Linux machine.


Watches


Suunto, Casio, Apple and Garmin make watches, and each one tries to quantify the wearer, so it feels as though the wearer must wear all three or four brands to get complete data for all four platforms. but to do this makes us eccentric. The simplest workaround is to track with one device, and manually update all the others.


Whether you wear a Casio, Garmin, Apple Watch or Suunto is also about something else. User Interface. The Garmin Instinct and Casio g-shock watches look tough/solid, while the Apple Watch and Suunto Peak 5 look more fragile, more elegant. The other difference is that the Garmin watch is solar powered and can last for weeks in summer, whereas the Apple Watch and Suunto Peak five can last for a day, or several. The Garmin watches can last for years, by default, because they use mobile phones to do the hard work. They just count steps and time.


Personal Technical Debt


I like the idea of Personal Technical Debt. The concept exists for IT and programming. Writing code is one thing, but updating it later on is a challenge. To give a simple example, if you write a static website by hand then every page that navigates to other pages, needs to updated every time a new page is added. If you use Hugo or another static website generator you see this with every build. My blog is both on wordpress, and as a static site. As a wordpress blog it’s slow and clunky to update because of all the bloat wordpress has added over the two and a half decades that it has been around.


In contrast with Hugo you write you page in markdown, add the categories and tags, run “hugo” and fifteen seconds later the site is ready to publish via GIT FTP. I spent months updating my static site to PHP before being sidetracked by Hugo and blogging.


The New Machine Routine


A while ago if you started to use a new machine you would need to log into all your sites, across several browsers. When I did this once or twice a year it felt slow and uncomfortable. Now that I slide between web browsers fluidly the time it takes to be up and running in Chrome, Firefox or other, is a few minutes. This is because my personal technical debt is low, and because it has become routine to slide between browsers, whether different versions of Chrome, Firefox or other.


With the Raspberry Pi Imager app you can instantiate a new server on an SD card within minutes, and it will be ready for you to log in via SSH whilst connecting to wifi with no user intervention. This is great because you can setup a headless system in a location with no monitor or keyboard.


Devops


When I started following courses on JavaScript, Ruby, Ruby On Rails and more I would get instructions on how to setup an environment and I wasn’t familiar with the process so I had to follow the instructions attentively. By trial and error, as well as repetition the process became relaxed.


I find that, as I become more comfortable with doing things from the command line, I find docker walk throughs more frustrating than helpful. This is because I want to get instructions on how to setup the environment fully, without the overhead of docker running in the background. On a 2016 mac book pro docker slows down the computer.


And Finally


When we do something two or three times we need to follow the instructions when we get stuck. If we set the time on a casio watch several times then it becomes habit. If we implement Linux instances on SD cards and experiment until we break things, then we know how to do things, without breaking them, in a production environment. If we change web browser once every few months or years it can take a while. If we do it several times a month it becomes second nature. That’s what experimenting is about.

Threads in Europe
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Threads in Europe

Byrichard

A few weeks ago Facebook (I refuse to whitewash that company by calling it Meta) decided to blackmail European users. The deal was simple. We were coerced. “Accept to pay for Facebook or we will force you to see ads. This was a lose lose situation that the European Union is now fighting. Imagine being given this choice. If you pay you’re going to be rewarding a company that has abused us.

Facebook Never Apologises for Being Immoral

Facebook enabled the spread of a genocidal message, it enabled the spread of disinformation to get both Trump elected and Brexit to be agreed to. It also experimented with making people more than once. Despite all of this Facebook never apologised.

When I was given the ultimatum of Pay up or you have consented for us to use your data they blackmailed us into either paying “protection money”, or being subjected to targeted advertising. It would give Facebook an excuse to say “But they agreed to us abusing of the data we have on them, and using profiling to manipulate them.

Pay or Be Data Mined

I got side tracked. The real issue is that people being given the choice to pay for facebook, or be manipulated Facebook could say “We gave Europeans the choice, and they chose to give their data rather than their money. This isn’t a choice. There are two to three billion users. It has a monopoly position so we can be isolated by not using Facebook, or exploited, by being on Facebook.

The Nuissance of Algorithms

I created my Threads account to preserve my username rather than out of a desire to use the social network. Instagram, Threads and Facebook all have the same problem. They force us to see crap generated by influencers and strangers, rather than friends. You can pay not to see ads, but you can’t pay to avoid the toxic posts by influencers. By toxic I mean anything that may have a negative effect on our mental well being, whether reminding us of our solitude, of our not being at an event, of not being at the right point at the right age in life and more.

Toxic Facebook

Instagram, for me, and many others, is toxic. I believe that Threads will be just as toxic. I noticed for example that we’re encouraged to like, rather than comment. Years ago I found that social media became far lonelier when people started to like rather than comment, reply or other. A like is a metric, a statistic. A comment is personal.

Social Networks Need to Be Organic

Social networks need to be organic. They need to encourage people to converse with each other, and to converse with the friends of friends. Social network should connect like minded people who have the time for each other, at a manageable scale.

After just a few minutes of using Threads I see posts by people with 4000 or more likes, hundreds of comments and more. My response is “I’m being forced to see content by people who will never reciprocate the attention. I am being spammed by influencers and other toxic individuals.

Of course, I could strive for finding something that 4000 people like, or three hundred people comment on but that’s not what social media is about. Social media is about a convivial intimate conversation between tight knit friends that eventually want to meet in person, rather than stay online. Facebook doesn’t encourage organic social network growth. It encourages the cult of personality. It amplifies the sentiment of being alone and lonely, of being ignored.

The Strength of 2006-2007 Twitter

The strength of social networks, including Twitter is that you started from a blank slate. If you had one friend you saw their posts, and their replies. If you had two friends, then you saw the same. The more active your social network became, the larger your circle of friends and contacts. There was a reward for investing time and attention on a social network.

With Threads we don’t have this. We see posts that are chosen by an algorithm that has nothing to do with our social graph. This is noise, and this devalues Threads because we spend more time dealing with noise, than worthwhile posts by friends.

And Finally

One of the greatest problems with Facebook is that it has a monopoly. It has Facebook, Threads, Instagram and Whatsapp. It has over two billion users. Whether you’re an early adopter, a late adopter, or a normal person, people with similar interests are on Facebook platforms so we’re forced to be there as well. Facebook has a monopoly, especially since the death of Twitter.

It’s a shame that social media has become a fight for attention, rather than an organic conversation between friends, colleagues and people who do specific activities together. Now is the time to use Threads obsessively to become visible, but I believe that I will end up feeling more solitude, rather than less.

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