It’s the great truism of the internet: You give an inch, and folks will take a mile.
Back when I was running ShortFormBlog in 2009, I remember trying a number of digital startups, all of which promised different ways to help monetize my content through optimization or some clever feature that made my site 5% better. These scripts were mostly horrible, with the exception of Apture, humane tech advocate Tristan Harris’ startup. I eventually got rid of most of them as I quickly realized what they were doing. But most of them had an underlying goal: They wanted my audience’s data.
The most notable example of this was Facebook’s Like button, perhaps the most infamous bait-and-switch conducted by the company before the pivot to video. The company convinced websites large and small to put a little code on their page in exchange for a chance at traffic. (And worse, they wouldn’t let you customize the damn thing to match the look of your site, so it looked ugly as sin.) But what was actually happening was two things: Facebook had created a massive dragnet of data on its users by making random websites a part of its network, and it was setting the stage for a lot of people to eventually shut down their external website and stay on Facebook. For better or worse, it changed online culture forever.
The external Like button died earlier this year, having served its purpose. Now, if you want to link your own website on one of those Facebook pages you quickly linked back to, you have to pay Facebook money. I’m not kidding.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this era, which brought us chumboxes and ever-intrusive ads, because it kind of feels like what’s starting to happen with AI.
Case in point: Over the weekend, I got an email from an AI company that wanted me to link their product. Not exactly unique these days. But what was unique was that it was essentially a form letter from a service called Listaify, which appeared to be a middleman that promised to get platforms to link your little startup.
I did some research on this and what I found was that Listaify had put me on their site, informing audiences that I was “accepting AI tools.” Now, if you read my prior post about these AI-based submissions, you probably know that I was not exactly raring to promote every AI product under the sun. Much the opposite. But this company had gone out of its way to describe my posting habits, what I was willing to accept and not accept, and my apparent reach. (But apparently, they had missed the part where I got iLands to add unsubscribe links to their AI bots by drawing attention to their bad behavior.)
Put another way, this company scraped my data. That’s bad.
But here’s what’s worse: This company not only tries to shove links into my inbox at a time when a lot of companies are shoving links into my inbox, but it has turned it into a business. It essentially encourages startups to pay them hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year to help you promote your tools on various blogs and platforms.
This sucks—it is a systematic strategy to wear bloggers down to promote AI tools, even if it’s not their focus. Plus, by placing themselves in the middle of the relationship, they’re taking potential advertising revenue away from outlets that could use it. This is not why I got into blogging nearly 20 years ago, and it’s not why I’m going to do it now.
Services like these exploit founders and creators by attempting to optimize everything to within an inch of its life, and it does more harm to the ecosystem than help. This is not uncommon with PR pitches, but it feels like every decision I make, every word I write on my site is a data point for someone else to exploit readers.
If you use this service, at least when it comes to Tedium, you are wasting your money. (In fact I updated my contribute page to forbid it.) If you want to support independent journalism, don’t exploit it.
(I will note, to their credit, that when I complained, they removed me. But there was no apology, no recognition that their attempt to push even more AI projects into my inbox might be unwelcome.)
But they’re not the only example of take-an-inch-give-a-mile philosophy I’m seeing creep up in a big way. Recently, I recently got a series of LinkedIn messages from a person running an adtech platform. He informed me that he had gathered all my past sponsor info to fill his database and was willing to give me access to it for free. I felt uncomfortable about the fact that he just took my data and was essentially trying to offer it back to me, and so (after thinking it over for a while), I told him to remove my information from his platform. Despite being so desperate to get my attention previously, he never replied.
I understand the nature of scraping of public data. It can be done in responsible ways. (And yes, it’s likely that ) And scraping is probably going to be an important part of the future of the internet. But in both of these cases, companies I never heard of tried to insert themselves into my business. And in both cases, I had to point out that I had not given them permission to do so.
Companies like these take an inch and give a mile. And they’re far from alone. There’s no ethics to it. It’s take-an-inch-give-a-mile across the board. It’s what eventually leads people to stop giving inches.
The internet, ignoring the gatekeeping, was built on a collective sense of altruism. People helping out other people. It’s why Craigslist exists, after all. But it just takes a few bad actors to ruin the whole thing, which means that it was arguably spoiled long ago. And as these examples highlight, there are more bad actors than ever.
I have talked repeatedly about how much I hate gatekeeping. But this is the kind of crap that makes people put up gates. We’re already seeing it on Reddit, where moderators for r/opensource awkwardly tried banning AI projects, only to face massive backlash.
I don’t want the internet to be a gatekeepery scene again. But they’re making it hard.
Good Actor Links
To Nevada, the 3-year-old that’s so good at soccer that someone called the cops on him: That’s a horrible thing to go through, but I can’t wait until everyone knows your name.
Hey all, if you’re in the mood for checking out a live discussion on the nature of death in the digital world, I’ll be taking part in a live discussion later on today with GraveSite, who published my recent piece on “forever domains.” It’s at 2PM ET today. Sign up over this way.
As celebrity music projects go, Dead Man’s Bones is pretty much one of the best ones ever. Ryan Gosling was a B+-list actor when it came out, and almost immediately after, he jumped up to the A+ list. So it’s no wonder that his very good Halloween-themed rock band, whose 2009 album notably featured a choir, stayed dormant for 17 years. No longer: They just released their a brand-new song this week.
Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal! And back it it (with some Halloween-themed stuff) later this week.
