Thread by @doctorow

Remember when they sneered at Geocities pages for being an unusable eyesore? True, they had some, uh, *idiosyncratic* design choices, but at least they reflected a real person's exuberant ideas about what looked and worked well. Today's web is an unusable eyesore *by design*. 1/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2022/06/28/bar… 2/

Start with those fucking "sign up for our newsletter" interruptors. Email is the last federated protocol, publishers are desperate to get you to sign up to their newsletter, which nominally bypasses Big Tech's chokepoint on communications between creators and audiences. 3/

Worst part: they're wrong, email's also been captured:

doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-7… 4/

Then there's the designer's sadistic superstition that "black type on a white background" is ugly and "causes eye-strain." Thus, the epidemic of illegible grey-on-white type I literally can't read, thanks to a (common) low-contrast vision disability:

uxmovement.com/content/why-yo… 5/

Often grey-on-white type sins are compounded with minuscule font sizing. You can correct this by increasing the font size from teeny-weeny-eyestrain-o-rama to something reasonable. 6/

But when you do, all the static elements on the page size up with the text, so the useless header and footer bars filled with social media buttons and vanity branding expand to fill the whole screen. 7/

This is made a billion times worse by the absurd decision to hide scrollbars (c.f. Douglas Adams' airports where they "expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not"). 8/

Scrolling a window (without RSI-inflaming trackpad gestures) is the world's shittiest, most widely played video-game, a hand-eye challenge of sub-pixel accuracy and split-second timing to catch the scroll-bar in the flashing instant of its existence:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1516136202235043841

9/

One of the scariest things about the precarity of Firefox is the prospect of losing some of the customizations and stock features I rely on to decrapify the web - stuff I use so often that I sometimes forget that it's not how everyone uses the web:

wired.com/story/firefox-… 10/

For example, there's Firefox's Reader Mode: a hotkey that strips out all the layout and renders the text of an article as a narrow, readable column in whatever your default font is. 11/

I reach for ctrl-alt-r so instinctively that often the publisher's default layout doesn't register for me. 12/

Reader Mode (usually) bypasses interruptors and static elements, but Firefox isn't capable of deploying Reader Mode on every site. The Activate Reader View plugin can sometimes fix this:

addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/… 13/

But when it can't there's my favorite, indispensable bookmarklet: Kill Sticky, which hunts through the DOM of the current page and nukes any element tagged as "sticky" - which generally banishes any permanent top/bottom/side-bars with a single click:

github.com/t-mart/kill-st… 14/

A recent addition to my arsenal is Cookie Remover. Click it to deletes all cookies associated with the current page. This resets the counter on every soft paywall, including the ones that block you from using Private Browsing.

addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/… 15/

Today, I added another plug-in to my decrapification rotation: Consent-O-Matic, created by researchers at Denmark's @AarhusUni. 16/

Consent-O-Matic identifies about 50 of the most commonly deployed #GDPR tracking opt-out dialog boxes and automatically opts you out of all tracking, invisibly and instantaneously:

consentomatic.au.dk 17/

We shouldn't need Consent-O-Matic, but we do. The point of the GDPR was to make tracking users painful for internet companies, forcing them to break down the data they wanted to gather and the uses they wanted to put it to into a series of simple, yes/no consent requests. 18/

The idea was to create boardroom discussions where one person said, "OK, let's collect this invasive piece of data" and someone else said, "Fine, but that will require us to display eight additional dialog boxes so we'll lose 95% of users."

pluralistic.net/2021/11/26/ico… 19/

What's more, the GDPR said that if you just bypassed all those dialog boxes (say, by flipping to Reader Mode), the publisher had to assume you *didn't* want to be tracked. 20/

But that's not how it's worked. Structural weaknesses in European federalism and the text of the GDPR served to encrapify the web to a previously unheard-of degree, subjecting users to endless cookie consent forms that are designed to trick you into opting into surveillance. 21/

Part of this is an enforcement problem. The EU Commission we have today isn't the Commission that created the GDPR, and there's a pervasive belief that the current Commission decided that enforcing their predecessors' policies wasn't a priority. 22/

This issue is very hot today, as the Commission considers landmark rules like the #DigitalServicesAct and the #DigitalMarketsAct, whose enforcement will be at the whim of their successors. 23/

The failures of EU-wide enforcement is compounded by the very nature of European federalism, which gives member states broad latitude to interpret and enforce EU regulations. 24/

This is most obviously manifested in EU member states' tax policies, with rogue nations like Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands and Ireland vying for supreme onshore-offshore tax haven status. 25/

Not surprisingly, countries whose tax-codes have been hijacked by multinational corporations and their enablers in government are likewise subject to having their other regulations captured by the companies that fly their flags of convenience. 26/

America's biggest Big Tech giants all pretend to be headquartered in Ireland (which, in turn, allows them to pretend that their profits are hovering in a state of untaxable grace far above the Irish Sea). 27/

These same companies ensured that Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner's Office is starved of cash and resources. 28/

Big Tech argues that their Irish domicile means that anyone who wants to complain about their frequent and enthusiastic practice of wiping their asses with the text of the GDPR has to take it up with the starveling regulators of Ireland. 29/

That may change. @maxschrems - whose advocacy gave rise to the GDPR in the first place - has dragged the tech giants in front of *German* regulators, who are decidedly more energetic than their Irish counterparts:

pluralistic.net/2020/05/15/out… 30/

The new EU tech competition laws - the DMA and DSA - aim to fix this, shoring up enforcement in a way that should end these "consent" popups. 31/

They also seek to plug the GDPR's "legitimate purpose" loophole, which lets tech companies spy on you and sell your data without your consent, provided they claim that this is for a "legitimate purpose." 32/

But in the meantime, GDPR consent dialogs remain a hot mess, which is where Consent-O-Matic comes in. Consent-O-Matic automates away the tedious work of locating all the different switches you have to click before you *truly* opt out of consent-based tracking. 33/

This practice of requiring you to seek out multiple UI elements is often termed a #DarkPattern:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.114…

But while "Dark Pattern" has some utility as a term-of-art, I think that it's best reserved for truly sneaky tactics. 34/

Most of what we call "Dark Patterns" fits comfortably in under the term "fraud." For example, if "Opt Out of All" doesn't opt out of all, unless you find and toggle another "I Really Mean It" box, that's not a fiendish trick, it's just a scam. 35/

Whether you call this "fraud" or a "Dark Pattern," Consent-O-Matic has historic precedent that suggests that it could really make a difference. 36/

I'm thinking here of the original #BrowserWars, where Netscape and Internet Explorer (and others like Opera) fought for dominance on the early web. 37/

That early web had its own crapification: the ubiquitous pop-up ad. Opening a page could spawn *dozens* of pop-ups, some of them 1px-by-1px dots, others that would run away from your cursor across the screen if you tried to close them. 38/

They'd all be tracking you and auto-playing 8-bit music.

The pop-up ad was killed by the pop-up *blocker*. When browsers like Mozilla and Opera started blocking pop-ups by default, users switched to them in droves. 39/

That meant that an ever-smaller proportion of web users could even *see* a pop-up, which meant that advertisers stopped demanding pop-ups. 40/

Publishers - who knew their readers hated pop-ups but were beholden to advertisers to keep the lights on - were finally able to convince advertisers that pop-ups were a bad idea. Why pay for ads that no one will see? 41/

Pop-up blockers are an early example of #AdversarialInteroperability, AKA #CompetitiveCompatibility (#comcom for short). 42/

That's the practice of improving an existing product or service by making an add-on or plug in that changes how it behaves to make it more responsive to its users' interests, without permission from the original manufacturer:

eff.org/deeplinks/2019… 43/

It's been more than 20 years since the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) tried to get tech companies to voluntarily recognize and honor their users' privacy choices. It failed:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P 44/

Do Not Track, another attempt to do the same, did not fare much better:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Tr…

But you know what actually worked? Tracker-blockers and ad-blockers, "the largest consumer boycott in history":

eff.org/deeplinks/2019… 45/

Making it *impossible* to track users is of great assistance to efforts to make it *illegal* to track users. 46/

Tools like Consent-O-Matic change the "#SecurityEconomics" of crapification, by turning the consent theater of illegal cookie popups into actual, GDPR-enforceable demands by users not to be tracked:

doctorow.medium.com/automation-is-… 47/

Decrapifying the web is a long, slow process. It's not just using interoperability to restore pluralism to the web, ending the era of "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four":

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

48/

It's also using a mix of technology and regulation to fight back against deliberate crapification. Between Consent-O-Rama, Reader Mode, Kill Sticky and Cookie Remover, it's possible to decrapify much of your daily browsing and substantially improve your life. 49/