Experimenting with all paid internet services and enshittification

As of late I have been thinking a lot about just how bad the internet has gotten. Google search is almost useless as it’s full of ads and not real links for page after page. Content farms and bots have made actual human content hard to find. Social media is just a giant manipulative echo chamber and it’s all done in the name of business and extracting every last penny from the user of the site. If you haven’t heard of the dead internet theory you should read up on it. I don’t know that I fully subscribe to the entire premise which is, that the internet is made by robots not humans but it sure seems like at least some of the internet is dead and that all this content is generated for the advertisers’ benefit. With AI in the mix it certainly seems so and even my local news webpage is so full of ads that it almost seems not credible.

Luckily the small web is a growing movement and hopefully it continues to gain traction. The small web is real websites lovingly created by hand by actual people. That’s how we tried to make our own website. This is why we built it from scratch, with no content management engine like WordPress. It’s as good as we can code it. I have a lot to say about the small web but that’s another article. Small web links

One of the main issues it seems is that the users of these products are not the actual customers of the business. Facebook/Meta and Google’s real customers are the advertisers and not the end user. This leads the business to add features to their products that benefit advertisers even if it hurts the end user experience. Creating an almost hostile (or user-hateful) end user experience there is a term for this, where products get worse over time, it’s called enshitification. When I was at DEF CON this last year the EFF gave a great talk on the topic and I was in the audience to hear. Is worth a watch and Adam Conover does a great job covering it here.

After thinking about the issue with ads and internet I wanted to try a lifestyle experiment. What if I used paid internet services in my personal life to avoid ads? I always like to test things out myself, and I personally HATE ads in any capacity so I set out to try and replace free services with paid ones. If the service is paid then YOU are the customer, not advertisers. When you are the customer it gives the company incentive to make their product the best possible.

First off let’s talk about email. As much as I love Gmail as a product, Google does not care about your privacy at all despite what their marketing may say. You are most valuable to them as a digital asset where they can harvest your data for advertising. There is a company called 37signals that makes a product called Basecamp that we live and die by here at Mastiff. I would even say we could hardly run the business without it. It’s an incredible product that is fairly priced and works great. I wish it was open source but otherwise I have no complaints. I have read the 37signals blog for years and I have really appreciated their views on business and how capitalism should work in a modern tech-driven world. So I was quite intrigued to find that they started their own email service called hey.com. Of course I had to try it out immediately, it costs $5 a month and doesn’t use ads at all nor do they harvest user data, since they charge for the service. Their approach to email is innovative to say the least. I have switched my personal email on over to them.

Hey is interesting in that it approaches email differently than Google or Microsoft. It seems their company goal is to make email useful again and to minimize the noise that ends up in all our inboxes. There are basically three sections, the main inbox, a paper trail for receipts and “feed” to see your emails in a large and beautiful way. Another thing it does differently is that you have to approve every sender at first. If you don’t approve of the sender you won’t see their emails. You can also hit “set aside” or “save for later” on your emails and it will remind you to follow up. I use my own domain for my personal email @bleedingpeanutbutter.com that way I can change email providers without changing my email address and hey.com lets me do that. Once you learn the keyboard shortcuts for hey.com it becomes quite powerful and fast to browse through only the emails you want without distraction. It’s a very forward thinking approach and I like seeing the 37signals guys fighting against the email monopoly of Google and Microsoft. We need more and more email hosts in fact. That way email will stay an open standard not controlled by any one company. I highly recommend Hey.com.

The next paid service to discuss is YouTube Premium. As a lifelong musician (I started playing bass at 15), I have to say it makes me quite jealous to see the kids coming up with YouTube to learn songs and how to play. What an amazing advantage. We had to figure it out through trial and error, or Bass Player magazine or get a VHS instructional video and those were hard to come by and expensive. To have this entire world of knowledge at your fingertips is just incredible. I use YouTube daily for learning about technology or music or gardening or just anything. So I decided to pay the monthly fee to not see ads constantly and it’s well worth the price of admission. Content creators still try and sneak sponsorship marketing in their videos but I’m OK with that as that’s how they fund their channel. I do NOT want to see intrusive and interruptive advertising. In that sense YouTube Premium is well worth the money. When I go to a YouTube video not signed in to my account it’s almost jarring. This one I have to ask how people live without. It’s like two different products, the ads on YouTube standard are so intrusive. This one is a no-brainer.

Third, I wanted to get away from Google search. Google search was once a crowning achievement of the internet, they were the search to beat. But over the last five years or so it has just become a mess. Pages of sponsored ads and bad AI advice is all you see at Google search now. Run don’t walk away. I have been using duckduckgo.com for quite a while, and I would say it’s now superior to Google search but I don’t see how over the long term they won’t fall into the same traps, since their actual customers are their advertisers. Now if you do nothing else after reading this you should switch to duckduckgo.com for search. It’s quite good these days. But then I discovered Kagi.com, it’s a paid-only search engine. A paid search engine is interesting, it’s the only economical business model I can think of where the user of the product is the actual customer. It’s $10 a month, and I thought if $10 a month isn’t worth it for your most used feature on the internet then what is? So I signed up and gave it a go and it’s amazing. It feels like the old internet again, with relevant results and no ads anywhere in the search results. They are also a huge proponent of the small web. I like that a lot. I cannot recommend Kagi enough.

The last thing I wanted to discuss was general news. It’s not difficult to see that news in the US has become completely unreliable. Half the “news” that we see is opinion anyway and post removal of the fairness doctrine in the 80’s it’s become completely polarizing. Years ago I realized that at minimum the goal of the news was to sell tomorrow’s news. The easiest way to do that was to focus on negative stories. Negativity keeps people tuned in. It keeps eyeballs on the station. So let’s not even talk about how news is manipulated by the government and large corporations. At its very core mainstream news WANTS you scared. That just wasn’t for me so I decided to not consume any major news with any regularity. If I want to understand a new bill I read the bill, if I want to see what’s going on with some world event I find the expert and listen to them. I try to get as close to the source as possible. So what’s the best way to get good news with minimum noise? Well that’s still a work in progress but I have found Substack to be fantastic. You can follow an actual scientist or doctor or whatever expert you want quite directly. Now I would say always do your due diligence to vet the person before you follow them and make sure they are credible and always keep a skeptical eye on anything you read. Fact check with peer-reviewed work and fact check the fact checkers. But you can get to the heart of the matter a lot quicker with a direct conversation with the expert. I have also found Patreon to have similar benefits. I subscribe to several Patreon channels myself and I love being able to fund these creators directly rather than have to go through the gatekeeper of big tech.

The internet can still be a very human place, but it takes some work and apparently some extra money. My day-to-day use of the internet is calming rather than chaotic now that I have almost no ads in my day-to-day world. To keep the internet a free place, maybe we do need to fund these smaller companies that fight to stay independent in a world of “maximum monetization” and tech bros that view people as possible engagement resources to be bled dry. Don’t underestimate the value of your attention to these companies. Right now we are selling it quite cheap and it’s time for a change. For now I will use the paid independent internet.