There is something so wonderfully easy about reading this column in a physical newspaper. You turned the page and here it is, with few annoyances or distractions, in an ultra-high-definition typeface that was custom-designed with pleasurable reading in mind. Or — wait — are you reading this on a phone? Did you follow a link from Twitter, or Facebook? Or maybe you are on a train, or a plane, or you are trying to use your laptop on your cousin’s crappy Wi-Fi connection out in the countryside somewhere. In which case, there is a pretty good chance that even getting this far is some kind of minor miracle.
Web-based articles, these days, are increasingly an exercise in pain and frustration. In many ways, the experience of reading such things is worse today than it was in the early days of dial-up Internet. Because at least back then Web pages were designed with dial-up users in mind. They were mostly text, and even if they used images, the text always loaded first. Today, by contrast, everything is built for a world where everybody has a high-bandwidth supercomputer in their pocket. That is not because we all do have high-bandwidth supercomputers in our pockets, although the Web technologists who are building these sites generally do, and have a tendency to forget about everybody else. Rather, it is a function of misaligned incentives.
When it comes to the economics of online publishing, the first thing to remember is that job No. 1 is not to get the news to you. Rather, it is to monetize you, by selling you off, in real time, to the highest bidder. This happens every time you click on a link, before the page has even started to load on your phone. Once upon a time, if you and I both visited the same Web page at the same time using the same Web browser, we would end up seeing the same thing. Today, though, an almost unthinkably enormous ecosystem of scripts and cookies and auctions and often astonishingly personal information is used to show you a set of brand messages and sales pitches that are tailored almost uniquely to you.
That ecosystem raises important questions about privacy and just general creepiness — the way that the minute you look at a pair of shoes online, for instance, they then start following you around every other Web site you visit for weeks. Whether or not you value your privacy, you are damaged, daily, by the sheer weight of all that technology.
Apple blogger John Gruber started off a new debate about these issues recently when he noted that a 537-word text post on the Web site iMore.com weighed in at 14 megabytes. (Fourteen megabytes of text should correspond to about 7 million words, or about 10 times the combined length of the Old and New Testaments.)
Gruber blamed iMore.com, but really it is not the Web site’s fault, since to a very large degree the owner of the Web site you are visiting does not actually control what you see, when you see it, how you see it, or even whether you see it. Instead, there are dozens of links in the advertising-technology chain and every single one of them is optimizing for financial value, rather than low-bandwidth user experience. Many pages, if you are on a slow connection, simply time out; they never load at all.
This is the tragedy of the commons. It is your bandwidth and you are paying for it, but everybody else is clogging it up with stuff you never asked for or wanted. The result is a hugely degraded user experience — bordering on the completely unusable, in many situations. Is there anybody who can fix this problem? Well, there is one potential white knight out there: Apple. The new iPhone operating system, out this summer, will allow easy, simple content blocking . This move is being sold as a response to privacy concerns, but it is sure to improve performance as well — at least on iPhones, and at least for people who have installed the right plugins.
More broadly, though, ads’ thirst for bandwidth seems destined to increase relentlessly, whether or not bandwidth itself increases quickly enough to meet that need. Already many Web publishers have started to force their viewers to sit through a video ad not just before they watch video content, but even before they read a text story.
Online ads have never got less annoying over time and you can be sure that mobile ads are going to get more annoying as well, once Silicon Valley has worked out how to better identify who you are. The move to greater privacy protections might help slow the pace with which such technologies are adopted, but there is no realistic hope that Web sites will actually improve from here. If you want to avoid the dreadful experience of the mobile Web, you will only have one choice — which is to start reading your articles natively, in the Facebook or Apple News app.
However, it will not be Facebook and Apple who killed the news brands. It will be ad tech.
The gutting of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) by US President Donald Trump’s administration poses a serious threat to the global voice of freedom, particularly for those living under authoritarian regimes such as China. The US — hailed as the model of liberal democracy — has the moral responsibility to uphold the values it champions. In undermining these institutions, the US risks diminishing its “soft power,” a pivotal pillar of its global influence. VOA Tibetan and RFA Tibetan played an enormous role in promoting the strong image of the US in and outside Tibet. On VOA Tibetan,
Sung Chien-liang (宋建樑), the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) efforts to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lee Kun-cheng (李坤城), caused a national outrage and drew diplomatic condemnation on Tuesday after he arrived at the New Taipei City District Prosecutors’ Office dressed in a Nazi uniform. Sung performed a Nazi salute and carried a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as he arrived to be questioned over allegations of signature forgery in the recall petition. The KMT’s response to the incident has shown a striking lack of contrition and decency. Rather than apologizing and distancing itself from Sung’s actions,
US President Trump weighed into the state of America’s semiconductor manufacturing when he declared, “They [Taiwan] stole it from us. They took it from us, and I don’t blame them. I give them credit.” At a prior White House event President Trump hosted TSMC chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家), head of the world’s largest and most advanced chip manufacturer, to announce a commitment to invest US$100 billion in America. The president then shifted his previously critical rhetoric on Taiwan and put off tariffs on its chips. Now we learn that the Trump Administration is conducting a “trade investigation” on semiconductors which
By now, most of Taiwan has heard Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an’s (蔣萬安) threats to initiate a vote of no confidence against the Cabinet. His rationale is that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)-led government’s investigation into alleged signature forgery in the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) recall campaign constitutes “political persecution.” I sincerely hope he goes through with it. The opposition currently holds a majority in the Legislative Yuan, so the initiation of a no-confidence motion and its passage should be entirely within reach. If Chiang truly believes that the government is overreaching, abusing its power and targeting political opponents — then
RSS