Crime wave

As I was walking past the Marriott at Metro Center yesterday I became engulfed in a swarm of spandex-clad cyclists, who turned out to be cops.

They were taking part in the Police Unity Tour, an annual event that raises money in honor of cops who have died in the line of duty. Participants come from police departments around the country.

Here’s what I thought, though: now might be the moment for someone to knock over a liquor store in Orlando, Fla., or Long Beach, N.J.

Social strategy

As long as I’m on the topic of web annoyances, let me remind you of promoted tweets. Those are the massively irrelevant ads-disguised-as-tweets that appear in your Twitter feed.

If you want to block them (meaning that the offending promoters’ content will never again darken your timeline) you have to go through a multi-click process. Yes, in the global scheme of things, clicking to rid yourself of pests is not onerous. But in social media terms, it’s a gigantic pain in the butt.

I do sometimes click on the tweets just to see the blowback they get from others also pissed off by the ads. That can be pretty amusing.

But I still wonder what the ROI is on these things, especially for the smaller businesses that think a few promoted tweets are going to take the place of real lead generation.

One example came into my feed yesterday:

It originated in October 2013. Do 23 retweets and 18 likes outweigh the hundreds of people who’ve blocked all of this company’s content for the past two and a half years?

Design creep

Well, isn’t this interesting—just one day after I happened to be discussing annoying web practices, I was doing some research on events management and came across something else that I’m seeing more frequently: online stalking.

I’m referring to the practice of having invitations to chat (or take some other action) not only pop up when you’re trying to ingest their content (in fact, before you’ve had a chance to read it), but also stalk you as you scroll down the page. Viz.:

And

I do not know what designers and companies are thinking with this, but I wish to hell they’d stop.

Yeah, okay—I do know what they’re thinking: they’re so eager for you to engage with a sales rep that they don’t care if you read their content; perhaps they don’t even want you to read it. I mean does anything shout “We want to sell you something NOW before you even know what it is” more clearly than blocking your access to the content, and continuing to block it as you try to move away from the damned box?

Not only that, it’s downright creepy to have that thing follow you about. It’s the online equivalent of Alex Forrest, and it does not encourage me to stick around your website, much less buy anything from you.

Round the block

Watching/using online properties is a fascinating experience. You’re a part of the struggle between Good and Evil on a daily basis, in so many ways. You don’t really need to pay $15 for a Star Wars franchise film (except for the Imax experience), because you get it whenever you hit a landing page.

Websites are becoming increasingly obnoxious about their ads—they literally explode in the middle of content, with (my biggest annoyance) loud videos just blazing into action and the close button nearly invisible.

Then there are the pop-up “sign up for our emails!” boxes that cover up the content about 12 seconds after you land. Very often you’re given only one option to make the obstruction disappear—enter an email address. (Although I’ve discovered that, even if they don’t provide a “Nope” choice, or a close-box button, if you just click outside the damned thing, it disappears. And if it doesn’t, I always decide that the content isn’t worth my time.)

Naturally, technologists saw the universal need in these scenarios, and thus were born any number of ad blockers, some native to the browser and some that you install as extensions. And as these products did their job, web publishers and advertisers upped their game to dodge, subvert and crush them.

Ergo the eternal war of Good and Evil.

For example, links to both Fortune and Forbes frequently are intercepted by a page that offers you a thought-for-the-day or some commercial message.

And I always wonder who it is, that one person out of their daily traffic of tens of thousands, who actually thinks, “Why, yes—I believe I’ll interrupt my quest for your pithy articles to watch some crappy commercial or ponder your faux-Zen management-lite truism.”

Recently I’ve noticed that Forbes is getting pushier about visitors to their site getting a free (at least an ad-free) ride.

I’m not the only one, as witnessed by this tweet that came across my feed:

But this is not the end of the story. Last week I was tracking down some information on events that Forbes puts on and I got into an endless loop of going-nowhere as the ad-blocker blocker refused to let me into the site, no matter how many times I clicked on the “continue to site” button. (I’d click and the page would refresh on itself.)

How did I solve the problem? I fired up Internet Explorer, used their crappy UX to get to the content page, and then closed it out again as soon as I got what I wanted.

I’m sure we’re due for more sophistication in ad blocking, to be followed by bigger hammers from the advertisers. I’m making more popcorn and settling in for the next chapter. It’ll be epic.

Gratitude Monday: I'll sleep on it

It’s a small thing today that I’m grateful for. Well, small and not-small. A bed. I’m grateful that, after nearly six months of make-do, I’ve got a real mattress and box spring to sleep on.

My previous set was way past its use-by date; I bought it around 1990, but I just never seemed to have the disposable income that would allow for replacing it. So it was always easier to not do anything about it than to go mattress shopping.

When I knew I was relocating across the country, I decided that ditching the set would be a forcing function, so that I could begin my new chapter on the East Coast with new sleeping arrangements.

(Getting it taken away turned out to be a Whole Thing, involving a company that promised way more than it delivered, causing me several new layers of stress on what’s already one of the life-shorteners. Maybe I’ll write about it at some point. Maybe not. But if you’re in the Bay Area, avoid an outfit calling itself Remoov.)

Once here, I mean, once in my new year-lease flat, it took me a while to summon up the energy and slime-repellant to go looking for mattresses. I don’t know why or how the sleep infrastructure industry turned into such a snake pit, but it rivals used cars and most medical procedures in terms of strategic avoidance of transparency and tactical bait-and-switch techniques.

So I went with Saatva, a direct-to-consumer online-only manufacturer. They weren’t nearly as transparent as they’d have you believe (they bury the fact that they charge $99 for delivery and set-up), and their response to me expressing my misgivings was to have some bolshie woman call to assure me that if I didn’t like their operating model I could take a hike. Which is certainly an interesting approach to customer satisfaction, particularly for something that costs more that five times what my first car did.

By that time, as I’d already told her, I was too tired to start the process over.

But my mattress did arrive (through some no-name delivery service) and it is such a luxury to be sleeping on a mattress, on a box spring, on a frame. I still have to deal with getting a headboard, but for the nonce, I’m just grateful to have my very own bed again. It’s a small thing, but huge for me.