new idea to get away from the web

Sounds great, Jamie. Please implement your idea with the endless modules and provide it to the public. Be sure to include instructions. We will be grateful, I'm sure.

Yes, and the expensive new program and its support can easily be paid for with the customized ads it inserts.

Hi,

It is a big project that requires very good programmers to do, beyond my own skill and time! But the payoff is huge to abstract the web.

I think there could be a lot of competition in the modules, ie there could be a module that just keeps track of popularity rank of other modules, just for a specific website, and then a use can run a popular module ie for facebook, and if the module at some time in the future tries to start monetizing itself, then its popularity would go down, so other modules would be used for interfacing to facebook etc.

Once there is just a single layer of abstraction allowed, it can layer on itself as much as people want. Right now everyone is stuck in "hard coded" website interfacing via standard browser windows.

cheers, Jamie

Bwahahahahaha >:-}

Unfortunately many website providers, primarily newspapers, are mounting a legal action against ad blockers.

I can't find my way back to the news item of just a few days ago, but I found this...

Aha! Here it is...

...Jim Thompson

This doesn't 'get away' from the web. It merely adds another layer to the interface.

Unplug, or develop discipline using other tools.

RL

The idea is to abstract the web, and add a layer of evolving intelligent design between the user and the rest of the web.

Basically an AI agent to do the low level traditional web interfacing and provide the user with filtered data in any format would be an analogy.

There should be personal AI agents for each user though, rather than just a single AI like Apple's Siri or whatever.

Basically an individualized AI that takes the place of all the web browsing that people do every day, and the AI's interact with each other to reduce the amount of useless interaction people have online every day. Think of all the time that could be saved, and this type of tool could really "get people away from the web" if the web is abstracted away.

cheers, Jamie

The reality is that people are staring at their "screens" most of the time they are awake nowadays.. really it isn't an isolated problem, it is epidemic in nature, so obviously people need an incentive to not be directly connected to technology.

cheers, Jamie

A large part of the problem is lack of imagination on the part of busines ses who've followed Google's website-building business model- provide conte nt without charging the consumer directly for it, but pay for the process o f providing it with paid ads.

They can't think of any other way to cover the costs of being on the web, and they certainly don't want to lose the income from the advertisers, so you get pages like Forbes which you can not access at all without turning o ff your adblockers. They've painted themselves into this corner and can't s ee a way out.

Guess whose pages I no longer visit, after sending them a regretful email explaining why. I'm careful to mention that static. non-intrusive ads are entirely acceptable but noisy, TV-style ads jittering in my peripheral visi on and yelling over what's going on in my real-world location are not.

I suspect that if enough people told such businesses to lighten up on the jittery distraction they might change, but most I've talked to either hold their virtual noses and put up with the ads, or just stop visiting such pa ges, leaving the business no clue as to why their hit rates keep changing.

Yeah, I know, "you complained about it, you offer a solution". I've thoug ht about it but I admit my head does not fit the advertising hat. I have no idea what they should do other than lightening up on the noisy, flashy bul lshit.

Mark L. Fergerson

I just added "uBlock Origin". Seems to be working pretty good. ...Jim Thompson

Or alternatively; a large part of the problem is the cheap consumers who don't want to "pay" for content.

TV has been doing it successfully for six decades. Why should the Internet content providers or consumers, be any different?

Have you ever so much as received a reply?

I suspect most aren't bothered by it as much as you are and perhaps even see it as beneficial.

I don't think there is a better solution, either. As much as I hate popups (and often stop following a tread if they get too bad), I'm not ready to go entirely pay-per-view, either.

In message , Jamie M writes

I think Gopher still works....

Brian

On 5/29/2016 11:12 AM, Jim Thompson wrote: [...]

First the anti-capitalists take away your ads, then they come for your guns, and then they take away your access to discount shopping coupons and on-line sales, and then they take away your Memorial Day shopping experience so you can't honor the troops at your local taxpayer subsidized Walmart Supercenter where ammo and gas grills and red, white and blue moon pies are 20% off...

• Most especially the increase of ads and F*king pop-up and cover-site BS.

There has to be a potential profit to do that.

The modules themselves could be sold or monetized by the authors, kind of like an app store where apps are sold to remove ads.

There would be lots of different classes of modules:

1. type that emulates keyboard and mouse movements and reads I/O from a standard or hacked web browser to emulate user actions or do repeated/stored common actions on specific websites.
2. direct code to website interface that bypasses the web browser and does in the background interfacing to websites
3. peer to peer interaction (module to module communication with local and cloud storage and processing for new applications such as distributed web indexing or distributed social networking etc)

In general abstracting one or more websites behind a single module is the idea, but a lot more could be done too.

cheers, Jamie

Unfortunately, the only alternative on offer to advertising at the moment is subscriptions to individual sites. What would be more appropriate would be a way of paying the sites one visits an amount that reflects the revenue lost to them as a result of their ads being blocked.

Would that it were that simple, though, since a system that actually did that would obviously be attacked by people intending to scam and game the system to get revenue that they could not possibly have achieved by way of actual advertisements, to the detriment of those who are willing to pay for their content.

Sylvia.

Sure, but so few people would pay the subscription fee that there would be no money in it anyway. Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.

There are all sorts of other models. One could pay the news aggregator a subscription fee, who would act as the middle man. I still don't think enough would "buy" it. When I get forwarded to a by-subscription site, I just get pissed at the one who forwarded me. I'm not about to pay for dozens of sites when I may want one article a month, likely less, a month.

There are sites that strip & repackage content, eg youtube downloaders. Content providers dislike them and have repeatedly broken their functionlity. The same would happen in your vision.

NT

and have repeatedly broken their functionlity. The same would happen in your vision.

Hi,

For highly used sites, ie youtube or facebook, the modules which parse the website data could be more advanced and updated more regularly.

Module to module communication and machine learning could be used to query users to find when the parsing functionality is broken and quickly update all the modules.

I guess it is kind of like the satellite TV battle where illegal grey area receivers updated access/encryption codes from internet websites.

cheers, Jamie

Everything could be done with enough money. So what? You lack a satisfactory financial model.

NT