CountChonkula

I get ads may be a necessary evil if you’re using a website or service you aren’t directly paying for, but 9/10 times it’s because of how they’re implemented and behave and advertisers and large publishers are out of touch with users and never learned or they simply just don’t care.

First off, it seems that ads always have to be presented in the most obnoxious ways and this is a problem that’s almost as old as the internet. I remember going online back in the late 90s and early 2000s, you’d get those extremely obnoxious and seizure inducing “YOU’RE OUR 1’000’000 VISITOR” or “YOU WON A FREE IPOD” ads. Today though, ads are still as annoying or even worse to an extent since every website now insists having autoplaying videos with sound or if you’re using a phone and trying to read an article, 3/4 of the page will be taken up by an ad and you have little room to view the actual content.

Secondly, ads have been increasingly becoming a privacy issue. Advertisers want to know every little thing about us and have the ability to track us around the web. I really want advertisers especially to know as little as possible about me because they clearly can’t be trusted with data wether they keep it internally or sell it to data brokers because some of the data they’re able to collect is alarming.

I’m all for trying to find ways to cut down on e-waste, but I don’t think this is it and it being water soluble could potentially shorten lifespan of devices because they could unintentionally disintegrate when it comes in contact with water.

This also doesn’t really fix the problem if electronics end up in a landfill as there’s still plastic, glass and batteries that’ll sit there plus lead is still a problem if it does use lead solder.

At best, it only helps if a device is properly recycled and it doesn’t really do much if it isn’t. The best solution is still to not needlessly buy new devices and use what you have for a bit longer and companies should support their devices longer. I doubt the latter will happen though because pretty much every company will favor profits over the environment and they’ll continue to greenwash to say how they’re carbon neutral. Unless you go with something super cheap, most smartphones should easily last 5+ years and then not providing software or security updates after a couple of years is purely a business decision.

There’s a learning curve with using federated platforms wether it’s Lemmy, kbin or Mastodon. Things will definitely improve as these platforms get more fleshed out but as is, it’ll probably come off confusing to a casual user.

To give Reddit and Twitter credit, they made it convenient to join communities as you just need a single account to interact with hundreds of thousands of communities and millions of people. It’s convenient as a user that you only need one account as opposed to 30.

If anything, we might end up reverting back to using smaller forums until the fediverse has time to catch up. I think it’s unsustainable as a business model and we’re seeing this with the self-destruction of both Reddit and Twitter where they’re leaning too far to try and make a profit where it’s affecting user choice and experience. Most people that ran web forums back in the day didn’t do it for the money but instead they wanted to foster a community. Yes going back to that might cause the internet to get a bit more fragmented, but I think it’ll work out for the best as both forums and the fediverse puts users first.