That's a terribly fatalistic position and also a misrepresentation.
Rejecting the centralized ad-driven wall-garden spyware model isn't "luddite" in the offensive sense you're using it. It's a matter of noticing what's best for the user and consumer, not for the adware companies.
The good thing is that it's still all there, just drowned out by the noise.
I maintain my blog as always have, I maintain my hobby interest websites for others as a reference source (some of these going back to mid 90s, some I've just started recently).
Search engines today make these harder to find because my sites don't bring the advertisers any benefit. I have no ads, no trackers, no "analytics" (aka trackers) or any such noise. Just content by regular people for regular people interested in various niche topics. But they still exist and people in those niche interest find their way to them.
My suggestion to anyone is that if you're looking to become famous and gather millions of followers and all that, sure, use the mainstream platforms.
But if you're just looking to share an interest, do it in a way that you control and keep the ad-spyware out: start a website, start a blog, start a mailing list. You won't scale to millions of users but that's a wonderful thing.
> I have no ads, no trackers, no "analytics" (aka trackers) or any such noise. Just content by regular people for regular people interested in various niche topics. But they still exist and people in those niche interest find their way to them.
We need a search engine/card catalog that makes it easier to find these real-person sites, that also checks on occasion that they are still not running analytics, ad-spyware, etc. I suppose an “Awesome” list could do the trick, even.
That's a terribly fatalistic position and also a misrepresentation.
Rejecting the centralized ad-driven wall-garden spyware model isn't "luddite" in the offensive sense you're using it. It's a matter of noticing what's best for the user and consumer, not for the adware companies.
The good thing is that it's still all there, just drowned out by the noise.
I maintain my blog as always have, I maintain my hobby interest websites for others as a reference source (some of these going back to mid 90s, some I've just started recently).
Search engines today make these harder to find because my sites don't bring the advertisers any benefit. I have no ads, no trackers, no "analytics" (aka trackers) or any such noise. Just content by regular people for regular people interested in various niche topics. But they still exist and people in those niche interest find their way to them.
My suggestion to anyone is that if you're looking to become famous and gather millions of followers and all that, sure, use the mainstream platforms.
But if you're just looking to share an interest, do it in a way that you control and keep the ad-spyware out: start a website, start a blog, start a mailing list. You won't scale to millions of users but that's a wonderful thing.