dan

Interesting thread. But I don’t understand why the data needs to be collected and correlated by a third party, can’t the ads themselves detect views and clicks? (that’s what they need right?)

Or am I missing something about the process?

My colleagues having a chat about their favourite tv shows in the operations channel at 7am have entered the chat.

Guaranteed they’d find a way to double dip. Price gouging, restricting content behind further paywalls, adding ads anyway… absolutely they’ve investigated all those and undoubtedly more.

Switch to Firefox, Chrome is their biggest lever to force this kind of stuff onto people. While Firefox exists and it remains uncool for them to block it they’ll have to compete against piracy and adblockers which will limit their ability to aggressively monetise.

Switch to firefox!

It’s pretty common for corporate stuff (legal or otherwise) to start with no payment changing hands, just a contract. Then an invoice lands either monthly or on completion afterwards.

That makes it easier for the work to actually start (otherwise you need to engage the finance dept up front and they’re often slow), and once the contract is signed and the work started that’s the sales process complete.

I know, but those techniques are more likely to cause selection weirdness than flexbox/etc, which is why I mention them specifically.

On mobile: multiple top and bottom tool/nav bars that automatically show/hide themselves when you scroll. They’re invariably more irritating than if they were just pinned at the top of the page (or perhaps viewport, but ideally page - I can scroll to the top of I want it back)

On desktop: animations tied to scrolling.

Anywhere: any kind of popup, modal, etc that I didn’t click on something to get. Please fuck alllllllll the way off.

The browser implements the text selection behaviour, but how infuriating it is depends on how convoluted your page construction is.

On a simple page with no floats, overlaid elements, negative margins, absolute positioning, hidden stuff, and other css layout tomfoolery, it’s perfectly predictable. It’s only when designers do designer things does it start to break down.

Best of luck with that.

I mean I’m still out here rawdogging usenet without a vpn. I keep waiting for the great crackdown on usenet but it never comes… Surely that comes before any VPN crackdown.

One gold upvote costs $2, the recipient might get either $0.90 or perhaps $1. But most likely they’ll get nothing.

But Steam doesn’t have a monopoly. There’s Epic and GOG and whatever Origin’s called now and probably others. They’re all free to exist, Valve doesn’t do anything to stifle competition, and even lets other companies sell games that start their launcher from Steam.

The only thing you have to lose by using a different system is that it’s probably not as good.

All they’ve done is produce a really fucking exemplary product and it’s become really popular because it’s honestly just good. The second it stops being good or Valve stop being awesome there’s plenty of alternative ways to buy games that I’m sure will be there to replace it.

But for now.. it’s pretty good.