frantone
patreon
♥ Glitch
🕑 Added 2020-03-13 15:39:32 +0000 UTCIt seems that all of the ♥ clicks I have been doing on posts here since the post I did on February 14th have not been staying put. Looking today it seems from my end that they have been erased - and re-clicking the ♥'s shows them red while I have the page up but logging out and reloading shows that they are not there. Seems that Patreon have changed their scripts and I have an incompatibility. It seems that nowadays every little tiny mechanism in a web page is handled by some 4th or 5th party company and web pages can run dozens of scripts feeding data to many dozens of companies with every click you make. Because of this for security reasons I run selective scripts at all times, but even on trusted sites they are forever farming out more parts of their platforms to who knows who and well... there you go. Anyway, it's not cause I'm not clicking the ♥ - it's just not recording it anymore because that data is now being sold to some 5th party company who gets those clicks. Evil! Oh Well...
Comments
Fran Blanche
Yep. And sometimes they are one in the same. Windows 10 is basically malware.
Fran Blanche
I run NoScripts which allows me to select the scripts I want to run on any web page. People just don't realize how many fingers are in the pie unless you run a plugin like that. The USPS site I use for shipping has over the past few years added dozens of scripts, and navigating that site has become a chore. Patreon is doing the same, trying to get income from every click - so some company wants to know what comments I approve of... for what? I could only imagine.
Fran Blanche
It's an issue with the platform that I have encountered for years. I think basically YouTube culls the ranks of channels as part of its own automatic housecleaning but the reasons for removing people from subscriptions still remain mysterious.
Fran Blanche
Indeed.
All of these massive online services run on distributed eventually consistent non-transactional data stores. I write software systems for a living and to be honest, I have no idea if all the disappearing likes and subscribes are a bug in the distributed nature of the system or malicious(?) social engineering from all these companies. Ultimately, I don't think outsiders like us really can know and even inside a company like Youtube or Patreon, only a few people would understand the system well enough to know about a problem like this. Unless of course it really is a conspiracy - then obviously the people removing the likes and subscribes will know. On the one hand, this seems to happen surprisingly often, but on the other hand, I don't think a conspiracy like that could stay hidden for very long.
Robert S. Owen
I subscribe to a YouTube channel that has been complaining in every video that subscribers keep complaining of being unsubscribed from that channel. This kind of problem is happening more and more as we hire more programmer "engineers" at high salaries.
Robert Sanges
Sometimes I'm glad I don't know how the sausage is made.
uBlock Origin helpfully notified me that 25% of the requests for this page were blocked as advertisement. We are all part of the product to be sold not the users.
Dr Andy Hill
Ugh!
Jac Goudsmit
If you're conscious about such privacy problems, it's possible that you use a program such as PrivacyBadger, which might block those scripts. My family complains all the time about not being able to go to a website on Google and I have to keep telling them: It's the Pi Hole DNS server that's blocking the links that go through the Google Ad server. So far the cure is not as bad as the disease but I guess it will eventually go that way. I'm not looking forward to the day that ad services and greedy individuals and companies will find a way to disguise themselves as legitimate information and actually that's already happening to some (large) extent. In some ways, the future is not such a good place to live.
Nicholas Wilson
Way of the world now. The line between legitimate & malicious data gathering is very blurry.
