What infuriates me about WaPo is that even though I pay for it, their site is pretty much unusable without an ad blocker. The text jumps around as I scroll to make room for dynamically loaded ads. And then there are the bottom-feeding Outbrain (or whatever vendor they use) ads at the bottom of the article. It's a mess.
What fields of research should I study - for example game theory, advanced psychology, etc - that will allow me to contrive laws with embedded side effects that politicians will never be able to figure out before ratification?
This GDPR thing - and the impact it's having on privacy/tracking/advertising - is nothing less than awesome.
I switched from digital news to paper and I couldn’t be happier. It took a little getting used to not checking the 24/7 news cycle, but it’s less stressful and the quality of articles is higher.
I did specifically chose a news paper with high quality content, and one that only arrives once a week to further the distillation of what News makes it my way, but it’s danish, so it wouldn’t do you much good. I’ve really grown to love the format though.
It takes a few months to get used to, but going back to traditional media consumption methods (paper, television, radio) reduced my stress and anxiety/FOMO level considerably.
The reason this works is because the newspaper eventually ends. The magazine eventually ends. The CBS Evening News eventually ends. That finality means I'm not hooked on a dopamine-fueled scroll->reward hamster wheel of diminishing quality "news" articles.
I'll admit that I will occasionally slip and lose an hour of two plowing through the endless Apple News feed. But for the most part, I only use online news sites for breaking news, weather, and occasional research.
As a side benefit, I have a surprising amount of extra time in my life to actually live a life.
I couldn't agree more. Everybody complains that monetizing content is really hard on the web, and then they try to triple dip the same user (subscription, ads, data).
While we're on this subject, check out Blendle. I find that they have the most interesting stuff from WaPo (and others) there anyway, but I pay per article (micropayments), and the reading experience is consistent across all outlets.
Fair question. I have, and have even cancelled before over it. But they still do quality journalism and it keeps bringing me back into the fold. Now I consider paying but using an ad blocker to be a more targeted instance of paying with my wallet.
I briefly subscribed, was astonished that the site was still covered in ads and even crashing on mobile Safari, and canceled. I had just assumed that of course a paying account would have no ads, but I guess I'm crazy!
> What infuriates me about WaPo is that even though I pay for it, their site is pretty much unusable without an ad blocker.
Counterintuitively, being a paid subscriber probably makes your data even more valuable to wapo and their advertisers so there is probably even more incentive to track you.
