The Interledger Community 🌱: sophie

Irrelevant Search: How Results are Ruined by Paywalls

sophie — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 18:04:37 +0000

By Robert Diaz

When things went digital, so did reading. Kindles and Kobos could be spotted replacing newspapers on train commutes, and iPads made digital paper feel glossier than a magazine.

Instead of print, we began reading and subscribing to publications through Apple Books, or bought one-off issues of The Telegraph through the Kindle Store - maybe that's what normalised buying digital newspapers.

It's not just the Kindle Store acting as a premium news stand, but also Search Engines like Google

These mediums were a natural progression from paper, and more importantly, their marketplace counterparts became an extra magazine stand and newsagent. Apple, Amazon, Kobo, and a handful of other digital book stores became a new set of new shelves, and a primary distributor for digital content - that is until paywalls on the web.

The evolving news stand

Like that transition from print to eBook, it made sense for newspapers to follow where most eyes were -- why not charge for premium content on their own websites?

Just as digital bookstores supplemented physical newsagents, websites also became part of a publisher's storefront. However, this time it wasn't the Kindle Store or marketplace that was the distributor, it was Search Engines like Google.Ask Jeeves search engine, from Web Design Museum

Search engines made content created by anyone accessible to everyone

Search engines over the years

Even before Google, search engines were a key facilitator in helping us access the interconnected society of the Web. Years prior, the likes of Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo!, were a main entry point. Through indexing site maps and crawling websites, search engines made content created by anyone accessible to everyone.

The web should be a platform that helps people and provides a net positive social benefit... The web should empower an equitable, informed and interconnected society. It has been, and should continue to be designed to enable communication and knowledge-sharing for everyone. - W3C

If you wanted to be discovered, your site needed to be indexed by a search engine, which would show the most useful links in response to user queries. But how useful is a paywalled article if you can't read it?

Meet the soft paywall

There's a number of different paywall types out there, including:

Hard paywall - pay for access, or you can't read anything
Freemium paywall - some free content, with a gated section for premium, high quality content.
Soft paywall - show the first 3 articles for free, and then pay to read more

Each have their different benefits, but a search for 'soft paywall seo' will show you that a main concern from some going that route is distribution - how to get ranked by Google whilst still gating content.

How useful is a paywalled article if you can't read it?

To jump back to physical magazines, you could compare it to finding a free perfume sample inside one. It's a nice to pick one up for free, but you pay for the full version. And that is the primary intention of a soft paywall for some websites - to use a search engine to distribute tasters.David Brent wiping a magazine perfume sample on his face

Search engines supporting gated content

Gated content helps news publications stay afloat, so every website producing quality content should consider them as an alternative to advertising. Contrary to a user's frustration of being hit by consecutive paywalls, search engines rank soft-paywalled content seemingly similar to openly free content. Google provides guidelines on how to make your paywalled content available to be crawled for indexing.

Every website producing quality content should consider paywalls as an alternative to advertising.

Usually, that's because paywalled articles come from reputable news sources, and are of high quality. Whilst it can be frustrating for a searcher, it's is great for supporting professional journalism, making it less dependent on ads.

User experience of surfing the Web

The rise of the soft paywall has however altered the experience of browsing the web. It's not what it was. Where you'd click from one link to the next, diving deeper down the rabbit hole of interconnected articles on an open web, you're now interrupted.

Google advises soft-paywall websites to make at least 10 articles per month free to read. The New York Times did this, but the other sites show far fewer (e.g. Medium.com only show 3), jarringly halting the once uninterrupted journey of discovery on the web.

We've all gotten used to a search model that's arguably unfair. A model where paywalls and affiliate links have insidiously become part of the search experience.-- Yep.com

You might think search engines have forgotten how we browse the web; that the only time we discover a link is through a search box. 3 free articles doesn't equate to 3 free search results for a user - the next time we come to a result for the same site, we're likely to hit a paywall.

How can quality content rise to the top?

The question is, should search engines equally support a poorly researched blog post published on a gated platform, as it would high quality professional reporting?

There's clearly room for improvement in ranking paywalled articles. Low quality gated blog posts still rank highly in search results because of their clickbait headlines, combined with the success of actual good quality content from reputable authors on the same platform.

Whilst search engines improve, I'll continue appending 'reddit' to all my queries, or using Yep by Ahrefs 👀?

If you enjoy this, subscribe to the newsletter here as I'll be contributing more on Prototypr. You can also find me on twitter @robdiazzz.

The Illusion of Ownership and Confusion of Censorship

sophie — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 11:58:38 +0000

The Source is a fortnightly letter from Prototypr for its community of ~600k viewers. Written by Sophie Clifton-Tucker, The Source tackles taboo topics, exposes unseen truths, and gets the scoop on the latest in the tech and design sphere.

What do Google’s Picasa, Windows Media Player, and Microsoft Paint (RIP)* have in common? Asides from being an integral part of my childhood (I may be showing my age here), these were all apps that ran on my PC - I owned and had control over them.

Nowadays though, from Figma to Google Photos, many apps we use run in browsers, or are hosted in the cloud. Whilst the cloud brings convenience (e.g. Figma’s live collaboration), control and data has shifted away from us, and into the hands of platforms and corporations. Rohan Deshmukh, in his article, Why You Should Start Self Hosting, highlights the issue:

Corporations get more control over updates, user data and licenses but users are at a huge disadvantage as they no longer are in control of their own data.

The discontinuation of Picasa saw our photos and data move from our PCs into Google’s new cloud option: Google Photos. Despite unlocking better performance, it begs the question…

Do we really own the content we upload?

This illusion of ownership becomes a more glaring when you look into digital media and e-book ownership:

You don’t really own the e-books you bought

Once you hit the purchase button for an e-book on Kindle, you’re not really in possession of anything from a legal standpoint. Those buy buttons in the Apple and Microsoft digital stores might imply you’ll get full ownership, as with a physical book, but in reality you’ve essentially just paid a middleman fee for access to the book’s contents. ‘Buy now’, should read ‘license now’:

Companies could probably educate consumers about this reality. But they don’t. Probably because no one wants to click a button that says “license now” or “rent until rights transfer to a new publisher. – Michael Kozlowski for Good E-Reader

‘Digital ownership’ is a misleading phrase; ‘digital borrower’ might be more apt. Although you may have built up an extensive collection of prison autobiographies in your Kindle library (just me?), nothing stored in the cloud is safe from disappearing into thin air. Just like Twitter can ban a user, Amazon can cancel and remove a book without notice. Take the award winning, When Harry Became Sally, for example:

Ryan T. Anderson

@ryantand

I hope you’ve already bought your copy, cause Amazon just removed my book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment” from their cyber shelves.... my other four books are still available (for now). tinyurl.com/RTAamazon

20:34 PM - 21 Feb 2021

So if you’re relying on the Kindle cloud, as opposed to downloading and storing the book, once removed from Amazon’s servers, you can’t ever get it back - you never owned it in the first place.

John Warner perfectly elucidates why you don’t really own your e-books, and the implications this has for the future. Beyond books, digital media middlemen such as Spotify and Netflix can do a disappearing act by cancelling shows and music:

You carefully curate your playlists on Spotify but every now and then you see a certain song missing from your playlist. Same goes for videos saved in your YouTube playlists or other music/video streaming services. – Rohan Deshmukh

Everything you upload can disappear (‘Your account has been suspended’)

It’s not just digital downloads, but uploads too; you can log in to YouTube/Twitter/GitHub only to find your account has been suspended, along with all your uploads – with no clear rhyme or reason as to why.

Just last month, JD Hendrickson and his wife lost 700 videos created over a span of 7 years due to a false bullying claim - with no way to recover their content. There’s a whole slew of such examples over on Hacker News.

Furthermore, Google terminated the Developer Account of a small company, removing access all their games and apps. In the end, it took a social media campaign to get their account reinstated.

After 10 years of working with Google Play and getting more than 1 million downloads in total, we have received an email that our company's Play Developer accounts are terminated permanently user/nadalizadeh on Reddit

Platforms such as Upwork have also been known to remove your account and all the data with it in a split second. They can even black out entire jurisdictions...say, if your country was at war…

YouTube’s demonetisation of creators

Whilst you may be the current owner of your content, your platform may well be the decider of how you get to use it. In addition to removing content, YouTube has come under fire numerous times for their seemingly haphazard rules behind what can and can’t be monetised. This seemed to have kicked off when Philip DeFranco reported receiving a message from YouTube informing him that his video had been demonetised due to “excessive offensive language”, which he rather be amusingly labelled as “incredibly fucking concerning”. Befitting.

They do get it right sometimes though, as is the case with Logan Paul after his infamous ‘suicide forest’ video back in 2017. Or brother Jake Paul’s controversial mall appearance. But then even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Whilst justified in some cases, other times the reasons for demonetising a channel remains unbeknownst to the content creator. As with many things on the big bad web, you’re at the whim and mercy of your platform provider.

🪦 Meet the Product Graveyards: RIP discontinued apps

To go to a further extreme, there are even cases where entire libraries can be lost. For instance, Microsoft shuttered its e-book business back in 2019, taking with it all the e-books from customers’ digital libraries for good. Another fallen giant was MySpace, who lost millions of songs, photos and videos - all user content from before 2016 vanished.

As technology progresses exponentially, it’s left a veritable graveyard of once-loved apps in its wake (have a wander through Microsoft’s), taking with it your carefully curated data. A moment of silence for that Spice Girls playlist you spent hours painstakingly compiling in 6th grade (…just me again?).

Handing the power back to creators

On a corporate-owned internet, where our digital goods lie in the hands of faceless organisations, they can be lost for any reason. Whether it’s to push a political narrative, or censor a writer’s unpopular beliefs that don’t match a platform’s opinion, it’s the creator who is silenced, and a whole point of view that’s getting erased:

With every book, there is always fear that the book is going to be pulled. The authors feel very vulnerable. – David Bernstein, publisher of Bombardier Books

So, how to avoid this dilemma?

For e-books, one way would be to buy directly from a publisher’s site. Or, as Mind Matters suggests, with classics like Shakespeare on the way out, you could also just purchase hard copies.

But it’s not the 90s any more - with the creator-driven internet evolving, there are some fledgling creator and journalist-owned projects that are offering alternative solutions thanks to advancements of the Web.

Meet the creator-owned platforms

These are projects experimenting with new business models involving Web 3 technologies and concepts (such as Web Monetization) that protect creators and authors, whilst keeping ownership in the hands of consumers.

One such example is The Brick House Cooperative, awardees of a flagship grant from Grant for the Web and self-proclaimed ‘wolf-proof media cooperative for people, not profits’. Their aim is to protect libraries and the digital future through Web Monetisation.

Libraries can only protect and preserve digital culture if they own their collections outright; books that are not owned are books that can be taken away. – Maria Bustillos, Founding Editor of Popula and the Brick House Cooperative.

This journalist-owned platform, led by @mariabustillos, is building a network of publications with an unusual business model, which will offer an alternative to the traditional publishing house model. “The status quo is buckling. And while that’s daunting, it also opens up enormous opportunities for people to try new and creative approaches,” says Kyle Pope, Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Journalism Review and member of Brick House’s advisory council.

Towards a creator-led internet (Web 2 to Web 3)

It’s still early days for initiatives such as the Brick House Cooperative and Web Monetisation, but they’re at the start of something that can shift the power on the web back into the hands of creators and individuals.

If you look at the history of the web and how it has progressed, such openings for opportunities and change have always emerged - it’s often been framed as Web 1, Web 2 and right now, Web 3, which goes a long way to remove that need for corporate middlemen like Amazon or Netflix; instead, you buy directly from the creator.

You don’t need the man to communicate on the internet. You don't need to depend on a corporation like Facebook or Twitter or whatever to get your message out there. – Tabi98

In its simplest terms, Web 3 is a decentralised web that tackles the issue of data ownership whilst resisting issues of data censorship. As neatly packaged by James Beck for Consensys, if Web 1 is read-only, then Web 2 is read-write, and Web 3 is read-write-own.

Today’s web is still a far cry from the innocent, openly-available internet of the 90s. The net was largely comprised of personally-owned websites and blogs, created simply for the fun of it, discussing myriad topics from niche hobbies to Zelda walkthroughs. But as Nelly Furtado wisely warbled, all good things come to an end.

And come to an end they did, as governments and companies sunk their corporate claws into this former online playground, and turned it into the capitalist hellscape it is today.

However, the ‘Old Internet’ is showing signs of quietly coming back, as highlighted over at Cheapskates Guide. Users are banding together to make the web a place of learning, inspiration, and collaboration once more.

What is ownership, in ‘The Age of Access’?

So, what have we learned?

When it comes to digital content, platforms can pull a Houdini and make it all disappear from your personal library.
Corporate-owned platforms can censor what favours them.
Web3 is riding in on its trusty steed, ready to save the day.

But…what really is ownership, and how important is it anyway? You could argue we don’t really own our homes or land either, but rather ‘lease’ it from the countries we reside in. Some academics have dubbed this period the ‘Age of Access’, where ownership has become largely irrelevant…unless you’re a ‘millennial’:

Erin Clyburn

@erin_clyburn

Instead of “millennial,” I want to rename my generation “the generation where you definitely have a giant cardboard box of DVDs in the attic that you never use because you have everything on demand but also won’t get rid of because you don’t fully trust digital content.”

02:25 AM - 16 Mar 2022

But your opinion on this is your own. At least something is…

The Ad-Free Web for Designers

sophie — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 12:23:56 +0000

The Source is a fortnightly letter from Prototypr for its community of ~600k viewers. Written by Sophie Clifton-Tucker, The Source tackles taboo topics, exposes unseen truths, and gets the scoop on the latest in the tech and design sphere.

We’re hit with it daily: it feels like every three swipes on Instagram or flick of the thumb on Facebook takes us to yet another creepily targeted ad, both making us a bit paranoid (OMG a Colgate ad – did Insta really eavesdrop on my toothpaste conversation?), and disrupting the user experience.

Our Twitter and Instagram timelines used to be about the people we chose to follow – people we know and care about. But we find ourselves hijacked by algorithms that feel designed to suck us down a black hole of doom-scrolling through dopamine-pumped content, ultimately to show us more ads. I came to see 1 picture of my mum’s dog, and reemerge an hour later with 5 new TikTok dances memorised:

fudia.

@fudiazd

i hate instagram now. i see nothing but ads, ppl i don’t even follow, and big accounts. where are the people that i know? the tl feels so cluttered

18:20 PM - 11 Mar 2022

At least Twitter recently announced a u-turn on this model.

If it’s not unethical ads, it’s walled content – remember the days where you could innocently scroll a blog without having half of it sucked behind a paywall? Where you could get through a whole video without an ad being shoehorned in the middle of it? When you were able to simply enjoy the internet?

Barry Petchesky

@barry

I swear to god @twitter I do not ever want to see “home.” Please let me always view latest tweets, and latest tweets only, and stop trying to shove the algorithm down my throat.

23:29 PM - 10 Mar 2022

How we’re building a more humane web

In the midst of dark patterns like privacy zuckering, and dodging shady UI copy that aims to trick us, there’s a growing community of us web custodians, who are actively building alternative business models that would make for a healthier, more inclusive web.

At Mozfest (an online gathering of web humans fighting for a more humane digital world), amongst projects tackling important issues such as misinformation and disinformation, neurodiverse wellbeing, or digitizing culture and language, a fledgling topic that’s rapidly gaining traction to tackle the shady corporate web is ‘Web Monetization’.

What’s Web Monetization?

In short, Web Monetization is the process of converting website views into revenue using open technology. Sound simple? Well, it isn’t, but it is an excellent way to combat the clogged-up ad-heavy subscription-saturated internet that we’re faced with today, whilst still monetising your content.

The process of making money against a content that’s informative, helpful and unique shouldn’t include these compromises on both, the creation and the consumption ends. – Veethika for Prototypr.

The successes of platforms such as Patreon or Twitch are proof that people are willing to pay creators for content that they enjoy, which is precisely what Web Monetization sets out to do. Creators get paid for their content in a way that doesn’t inhibit the reading, watching, or listening process, in a way that is open and accessible to all.

Open Source Prototypr 😃

As awardees of a flagship grant from Grant for the Web, our MO is to help contribute to this fairer, open web by developing Prototypr as an inclusive, Web Monetized publishing platform for designers.

We’ve just launched a microsite on how our new platform is being built, and how you can create your own! Check it out:

👉 https://open.prototypr.io/

We’re working on a new platform that can earn you rewards as you read and write!

By providing openly accessible, quality content from designers across a vast array of cultures, we’re taking our first steps towards democratising design content – all whilst rewarding our contributors.

The evolution of advertising

As opposed to earning money from garish advertising, sneaky subscriptions, data mining or paywalls, Web Monetization uses a browser API that streams micropayments to a website’s digital wallet as you read, watch, and listen to content. As put by the Artist Rescue Trust, it’s a “financial fist bump made between creators and their audience.”

What we experienced as a society was the rise of free social platforms that collected our personal data to then turn around and place targeted advertisements in our news feeds. – Ken Melendez

As Ken Melendez puts it, this way of earning revenue is considered by some as “unethical and intrusive to the user experience” – and I would tend to agree.

We’re hit with it daily: it feels like every three swipes on Instagram or flick of the thumb on Facebook takes us to yet another targeted ad.

AdBlock – the most popular extension for Chrome and Safari

It’s Complicated: Sean McGowan describes the partnership between UX design and advertising as a union that is “not just useful – it is necessary for both fields” in his article Advertising and UX: A Complex Relationship.
Monetising on YouTube: YouTube UX lead Javier Bargas-Avila reveals that user experience guides everything they do – their first priority is to show the right ads to the right users at the right moment. “When we achieve that, video ads aren’t intrusive – they’re part of the experience.” Added to this, the video sharing giant have announced their upcoming plans for 2022, which will dip a toe into the world of Web3, blockchain, and NFTs and “allow creators to build deeper relationships with their fans” and “further monetise their YouTube content.”
Designer Usability Mistakes: Among the most hated online advertising techniques are modal ads, ads that reorganise content, and auto playing video ads, as confirmed by a survey that presented participants with 23 wireframes for different types of ads and encouraged them to rate their dislike on a scale of 1-7. Interestingly, ads tend to be more negatively received on mobile devices than on a desktop, which is unsurprisingly given the lack of real estate.

Most hated online advertising techniques | NNGroup

The Grand Web Monetization Experiment

Mozilla Festival (AKA MozFest) took place last week between 7th-11th March, seeing designers, developers, artists, and activists come together for the annual event. Many of the recorded sessions (which are available online until 25 June with an on-demand ticket) were centred around Web Monetization (see a full schedule of related events here), whilst introducing a ‘tipping experiment’.

Spatial Chat Zine Fair at MozFest 2022

In conjunction with Coil and Mozilla, Interledger held this Mozfest-wide experiment which granted all ticket holders a free Coil account prepopulated with $10 USD of credits. These credits could then be used to ‘tip’ single amounts as well as stream micropayments, in order to acclimatise attendees to the Web Monetization realm, as well as supporting content supporting the free, open web.

Here’s a peek of what this tipping might look like using the Coil browser extension:

Coil

@coil

If you’re not attending MozFest this week, here’s a sneak peak of what tipping websites with the Coil browser extension looks like.

As part of our sponsorship, @mozillafestival attendees receive this feature, $10 tipping credits & a 6-month Coil Membership.

Happy tipping! 💸

20:38 PM - 09 Mar 2022

For more information and to access the resources, visit the Mozfest 2022 Landing Page.

Play/Learn and Earn

The ‘Play and Earn’ or ‘Learn and Earn’ models do exactly what it says on the tin – earn rewards (typically crypto assets) for playing an online game or for interacting with other web-based content.

One such game is Axie Infinity. This video game, built on the Ethereum blockchain, is comprised of virtual creatures (‘Axies’) which are used to fight opponents in a Pokémon-style battle. But these aren’t your average game creatures – they’re also NFTs. You will be the sole owner of your Axie, and even all the in-game items and assets you acquire are crypto.

The Learn and Earn model works on a similar concept – watch videos or read articles, and as an incentive receive crypto assets as a reward.

Our chance to impact the web

Web Monetization can be a tricky field to navigate, what with it still being in its fledgling stages. The technology is still developing, and the terminology and user experience can feel fragmented. However, as designers and developers, we have an invaluable opportunity to shape the web – but this has to be done in a user-friendly manner.

If you want to get involved with creating this ad-free web, we can start by learning from designers and developers who have gone before us.

For example, Uchi, developer advocate and founder of Chimoney, advises that in order to make the consumer’s journey as fluid as possible, every step along the way should be explained in easy-to-understand, accessible terms. E.g. ‘Web-Monetised’ content might instead be referred to as ‘User-Supported’ or ‘Ad-Free’ content.

To make web monetization accessible and easy to break into, consumers’ user journey needs to be concise and easy to follow.– Uchi Uchibeke for Dev.to

Here’s his recommendations on where the customer journey for Web Monetization can be improved:

Phase	Status	Recommendation
Discovery	⚠️	For consumers, rebrand Web Monetization around consumer benefits (i.e., Reader-supported content, Ad-free content?)
Evaluation	⚠️	Create customer-centric, content-driven landing page and newsletter of web-monetized content
Decision	✅	Coil handles this well. Affiliate program for providers in the system?
Opt-in	✅	Improve documentations around Puma browser and the Web Extention because for someone new to extensions, it is hard to install and setup
Retention	–	Create browsing tools that highlight Web monetized content in realtime from search results

Table above highlighting some areas of the content consumer journey and recommendations for improvement – By Uchi in Dev.to @uchibeke

For a full list of Web Monetization resources, take a look at this library made up of WM providers, digital wallets, video streaming sites, social media platforms, tutorials and much more. You might even spot some familiar faces, such as freeCodeCamp and Hackernoon.

And to round this letter off on a happy note, check out this tweet from Mural Stories – a tool for visual sorytelling – proving that Web Monetization truly works. Welcome to the future.

Douglas Arellanes

@dougiegyro

The @mozillafestival Grand Web Monetization Experiment works! We've now made enough for two months of @muralstories hosting thanks to tips from MozFest attendees! Thanks, @Coil and @Interledger! #webmonetization #XRP

09:27 AM - 12 Mar 2022

The Freemium Web: You’ve Read All Your Free Articles This Month

sophie — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 16:18:11 +0000

What do we want? Openly accessible, quality design content! When do we want it? Well, permanently, actually…

Earlier this month, whoops and hollers rang out from Prototypr HQ as we became awardees of a flagship grant from Grant For the Web/Interledger — and we’re planning on doing great things with it.

We’re developing Prototypr to be an inclusive, privacy-first publishing platform that rewards our contributors whilst democratising design education. Contributors will be in with a chance of winning monthly rewards for their top-notch writing. And we haven’t forgotten about our readers; we’re exploring ways to reward our readers involving unique artworks, collecting tokens, and leaderboards — earn as you learn. 🤓

So we’re stripping things back to basics: simple, legible, and most importantly free content, unburdened by paywalls or trackers, and managed entirely by you. But more on that later. If you want to be the first to know, pop your email down below.👇

Let me take you back to the days of yore, when the internet was all Napster, Neopets, and poorly-coded websites about which member of 5ive was the cutest. (Scott, duh.)

But even back then, it seems we were doing something right. Information on any topic could be found readily and freely, with no hidden nasties; people were eager to share their knowledge and experiences just for the joy of it, creating a first-of-its-kind, online, collaborative community.

Where did it all go wrong?

As we’re pushed from paywall to paywall, fighting off pop-ups, navigating cookie consent and being pigeonholed into having to create yet another account, today’s online community is beginning to feel a little more like the kid at school covering his notebook so you can’t see… unless you’re willing to share your cookies.

Let’s start sharing for the joy of it again.

Make Free Stuff

Max Böck has spun some words of wisdom, and I’m not just saying that because he agrees with me. Max ruminates on how today’s websites are designed to extract something from you, be that analytics, personal info, or money.
It’s no longer about what the web can offer you, but what you can offer the web, as perfectly (and humorously) demonstrated by User Inyerface.

This is the web as envisioned by late-stage capitalism: a giant freemium game where absolutely everyone and everything is a ‘digital asset’ that can be packaged, bought and sold. – Max Böck

As witty as it may be, there’s a sinister Black Mirror-esque undertone running throughout this parody…but this is the web we’re living in. In the words of Yeezy, ‘do anybody make real shit anymore?’

And what of Facebook? “But it’s free!” I hear you cry. Well, if the old adage is anything to go by, that would make you the product.

And is it even really free, anyway? As well as the many, many, (many) hours of my life it’s sucked into the abyss, Facebook has also taken pretty much every piece of data that makes up who I am, right down to my stripper name. A pretty big cost, if you ask me (Fuzzy Richards).

In this culture, the task of the self-appointed web hustler is to build something fast & cheap, then scale it as much as possible before eventually cashing out. – Max Böck

But it’s #NotAllSites! Take Wordle; I mean sure, it was sold to the New York Times for upwards of a million dollars earlier this month, but surely their intentions are pure? 👹 To be fair to him, creator Josh Wardle (see what he did there?) did state that the game would remain free and that the (multi-million dollar, advertising giant) broadsheet’s values were aligned with his.

In any case, Wordle is (or was) the perfect example of a creator making something for the joy of it, and then sprinkling that joy around the web like confetti, and subsequently creating a global community of excited, frustrated, would-be wordsmiths — just because.

On an unrelated note, here’s an entirely pointless but devastatingly cool tool that generates your Wordles into townscrapers, because why the hell not.

Privacy Invaders

EU vs US

This just in: Google Analytics has been deemed unsafe for use by French data protection authorities, citing a breach of Article 44 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

A TL;DR of the statement issued by CNIL: A French website utilising Google Analytics has been given a month to stop using it under current conditions, as sharing European data between countries with lower privacy laws is not permitted as per data protection regs — and the US isn’t exactly known for its care of sensitive data…outside of Area 51.

This follows a similar scenario in Austria, and in the absence of a new EU-US data deal, other countries may follow. (And check out what went down in Germany involving the violation of an EU privacy law thanks to Google Fonts.)

It’s interesting to see that the different European data protection authorities all come to the same conclusion: the use of Google Analytics is illegal. - Austrian lawyer and privacy activist Max Schrems

Cue Meta and a cheeky little non-threat about withdrawing their services in Europe if the GDPR continues to prohibit them from filtering data back to the US. Europe’s response?

“After being hacked, I’ve lived without Facebook and Twitter for four years, and life has been fantastic.” — German Economy Minister Robert Habeck
“I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook. Digital giants must understand that the European continent will resist and affirm its sovereignty.” — French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire

Go on, Europe! But also please stop. How else will I remember my mum’s birthday?

However, I think we can safely call their bluff as the bottom line is there is simply too much money at stake, and after an eye-watering $230bn loss in market value earlier this month (the biggest one-day loss ever by a US company), Meta ought to be plugging leaks where it can (no pun intended).

It’s the symptom of a culture that sees the web purely as a business platform. Where websites serve as elaborate flytraps and content as bait for unsuspecting users.

The tyranny of the Meta family of apps may well be grinding to a slow halt regardless as Facebook recorded a loss of approximately half a million users during the last 3 months of 2021, indicating that user growth has peaked. Sad news. In slightly less sad news, Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has taken a $29bn hit as a result.

Cool Stuff

Photogrammetry: Research & Development (R&D) at the New York Times explores how emerging technologies can be applied in service of journalism. Here, they share 4 demos on how to publish 3D models within web-based journalistic articles.
Not All Settings Are Created Equal: Adrien Griveau, designer at Linear App, ponders why ‘Settings’ are seen as a result of design failure, and how to make them sexy again.
The Pseudorandom Nature of Generative Art: What is Generative Art? Amy Goodchild has answers, and offers a structure for establishing the different types of autonomy and for exploring generativity.
Wordles of the World: If your daily quota of Wordle isn’t quite filling your boots, this website has compiled a list of 535 similar games and resources in 124 languages. There goes my to-do list.
The Limit Does Not Exist: Digital detective and cyber sleuth Jane Manchun Wong, famous for uncovering previously unannounced features within apps, has only gone and done it again. Allegedly, Twitter is working on something called ‘Twitter Articles’. Move over, Medium! Twitter’s been busy, as they’re also soon to introduce NFT profile pictures that will be displayed in a hexagonal shape (as opposed to the current circular ones), and connected to your crypto wallet.

Be part of the movement and help define the future of Web3 at Prototypr. Contribute your articles and get featured at: hello@prototypr.io, and follow us on Twitter.

👋 Prototypr Team: Sophie, Graeme, Ann, Illustrations by Mimi 💛