The internet has made us all boiled frogs.
The boiled frog syndrome is that people don’t accept bad situations at once. If I was to suggest you need to listen to screams all day, you would think I was bonkers. If I told you that you would be given a dollar for every scream every hour… maybe you would say yes. Then the scream got a little longer. A couple more screams, but a slightly higher payout. Longer screams. A little less payout. More screams. Etc etc until your life is now making nothing and listening to a scream all the time. You would be a boiled frog, the temperature getting higher and higher until you didn’t even know you were dead.
So on one side of the internet, places like Facebook and Youtube have removed your ability to see things the way you would like to see them in lieu of providing you the things it expects you want to see. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen them before or they are years old – their science has shown this content will provide them with the best situation for revenue, and what you want bedamned.
I spend more of my life than I would care to admit trying to find ways to give me data the way I want it. The people that have grown with the modern internet, at times, don’t even realize that these are options! The belief that for your video to be relevant it must be on Youtube or have high Ups on Reddit… all the while your work, your art, your podcast, your video, is chaff on the wheel of data aggregation.
Here – to help you all on your journey of freeing yourselves from the shackles of Big Data are some applications and programs I use to help me fight through the drudge of companies telling me what and how I want to look at things. If you have any more, you know where to find us….
BNTP – Bookmarks in New Tab
This is actually the thing that spawned this article. I lose links. Google is getting harder to find fine-tooth detail the way it used to. This bookmark app puts all of your links right up front and they’re super easy to read and organize. Love it.
Fluff-Busting Purity
Facebook is a nightmare. Ads. Data spread out. Timeline in hodgepodge order. Ads. Sponsored posts… which are really just ads. Only seeing 20 of your friends posts and feeling like you are missing out on so many other people’s lives. Fluff-Busting gives you a giant list of ways to change Facebook from dark mode to removing sidebars to tabbing everything. I have no idea what modern Facebook looks like.
Reddit Enhancement Suite
This is almost a gimme if you are a reddit user – but I have to assume there are some that aren’t aware of it. RES adds so many useful desktop features to Reddit. Sadly, organizational control over when articles came in isn’t one of them – but tagging users, mass opening, color coordinationn, tabbed viewing and grouping. It really makes Reddit a slightly less home for scum and villainy.
