Last week, I found a way to derive a whole bunch of Internet complaints out of just one single Facebook post.
“Amazing! Soon, Drones will replace the fishermen.!” the offensive post claimed. I say offensive because, right of the bat, it was a “sponsored post,” which in social media euphemistic parlance means advertisement.
I hate this crap in my Facebook newsfeed and I routinely click the button to remove block these things. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t get the message, they just keep trying different kinds of ads presumably assuming I like being inundated with ads, but they haven’t yet figured out which ones I want to see.
Back to the post itself. Firstly, the poor grammar and punctuation of the headline is annoying. I also knew immediately it was going to be ridiculously misleading. Could someone actually catch a fish using a drone? Probably. Does that mean drones are going to replace fishermen? Puh-leeze.
Nevertheless, at the risk of being drawn into quagmire—I was looking for column fodder, after all—I clicked. I was taken to an extremely bad blog page called latest-device-technologies.com. There was, in fact, a video, but the first couple of times I tried to start it I was taken to commercial pages. Again, advertising.
I can remember the excitement of the promise of the Internet as a free and democratic marketplace of ideas at your fingertips.
That promise is dead. There is good content out there, but it is increasingly getting more and more buried under the crap, all of which is designed to sell you stuff you don’t need and probably should not even want.
So, this really bad blog site, and its ancillary Facebook page, appears to be run by a semi-literate, drone-obsessed Internet opportunist.
Click anywhere on his page, and you either get kicked over to a sponsor’s page or invited to post his Facebook page on your Facebook page.
The video, once you get it to work, is predictably lame. The guy does appear to catch about a four-inch sunfish with his drone. Had I not got this column out of the experience, it would have been one of those, ‘well, that’s 15 minutes of my life I will never get back’.
At least it wasn’t one of those “15 Pictures of Celebrities that Almost Broke the Internet” sites, where you have to reload a new page of advertisements to see each of the photos, which are, of course, disappointingly unremarkable and/or photo-shopped.
I tried to read some of his other blog posts, but they are so badly written, I just gave up.
I’ve recently been reading a bit about the “Dark Web”. This is basically Internet resources not available to the casual user because they are not indexed by the popular browsers and search engines. This is where a lot of illicit activity goes on, apparently, but not necessarily exclusively.
I would be really happy with a “Light Web” where only intelligent content is available. I would probably even pay for that.
