The Awl

The original(?) article on chumboxes is still the best: https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/

Exact same, Pocket is so close to being the perfect service and yet so far. I have a huge archive and their search is just terrible. I will have a specific keyword from an article I know I have in there, and yet all I get from their results is utterly irrelevant articles. Making it worse, you can't filter the search results to, say, your Favorites, so I have to sift through all the random crap in my full archive. I ask for that great article about leaded gasoline (https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-most-important-scientist-you-ve… and Pocket gives me an article about Rebecca Black instead (https://www.theawl.com/2011/03/arms-so-freezy-rebecca-blacks-friday-as…

Someone made a laser that shoots mosquitoes: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/laser-shooting-mosquito-death-… While googling that so I could provide the link, I found a household robot that's doing the same thing: https://www.theawl.com/2017/01/i-love-this-robot-that-kills-mosquitos-… Just thought you might be interested to know your idea exists.

Don's rebuttal; "I am often told that the furniture is not comfortable, and in that not functional. The source of the question is in the overstuffed bourgeois Victorian furniture, which, as I said, never ceased. The furniture is comfortable to me. Rather than making a chair to sleep in or a machine to live in, it is better to make a bed. A straight chair is best for eating or writing. The third position is standing." - 'It's Hard To Find A Good Lamp' 1993 http://s3.amazonaws.com/juddfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/… I'd also suggest reading "Being Dumb" by Kenneth Goldsmith, as a reminder that not everything requires a strict practicality to be great. https://www.theawl.com/2013/07/being-dumb/

Best part IMO is the notion of LARPing your job on Slack, which is a reference to this 2015 piece https://www.theawl.com/2015/04/are-you-just-larping-your-job/

> What I mean by "junk" links is the "Top 10 Best Sumerian Gods", etc. These frequently contain content lifted from other sources - including each other, spam-like advertising, and simply prey on the search engine's algorithms to get on to the front page beating the interesting content down into pages 3,4,5 and beyond. Better known as chum: https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/

The chumbox (https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/) used to be a good barometer of the spamminess of a site's content. It appears that recently Wordpress rolled out the chumbox on free sites. It turns every one of them into a ghastly display dreck. It also normalizes the chumbox. Seeing a site without at least one chumbox these days is becoming difficult. It's not hard to imagine a future in which the Gut Doctor follows you around to every site you visit, like Big Brother dressed in a clown costume. Strangely, I also find myself going directly to the HN comments before even clicking on an article. Maybe its the inevitable result of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect finally wearing off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

For a flavor of the content that is being reminisced, an old favorite: https://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcrib-as-arbit…

Here's a related article some may find interesting if you like this one: https://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-se… It's about the writer David Foster Wallace's annotated self-help library. I think it's fascinating to see the energy with which someone who is brilliant consumed low-brow self-help literature. Alas it seems like it did not work in the end.

This seems a slightly more upscale (but also less insightful) version of the classic analysis of "chum box" ads: https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/

Another excellent piece on the ideology for the layman: "The Darkness Before the Right" https://theawl.com/the-darkness-before-the-right-84e97225ac19 the same author's clarifying follow-up is good too, though with a lot more academic jargon: https://pmacdougald.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/accelerationism-left-and-…

It can be done relatively simply when you make direct deals with ad agencies or cross-promotion deals with other product companies. The problem is that no ad network wants to be a part of it; and for the little guy, ad networks are the only thing with economies-of-scale large enough to be interested in purchasing your nearly-worthless ad-space. Thus my view: we need a "catalogue of creative, you pick what you run"-style ad network, so that the little guys have somewhere to turn instead of acquiescing to the existing networks and ending off with their sites showing chumboxes[1]. [1] https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b7a070a2d#.…

Great fun -- but this version of the prank is probably only about 85% accurate. It's not clear the phantom book ever did make any best-seller lists, though it certainly did get talked about. Here's a 2013 telling from The Awl that's a little more careful with the details: http://www.theawl.com/2013/02/the-man-behind-the-brilliant-media-hoax-… Either way, it's a wonderful story.

Note that this text is in some cases censored. See Cameron Todd Willingham's statement: "Yeah. The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man - convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do. From God's dust I came and to dust I will return - so the earth shall become my throne. I gotta go, road dog. I love you Gabby. [Remaining portion of statement omitted due to profanity.]" The full text is in fact pretty profane; see http://www.theawl.com/2009/12/cameron-todd-willinghams-real-last-words . The New Yorker article which lays out the case for Willingham's innocence omits the latter half of the statement entirely — see last paragraph of http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann .

> There was a post a bit back (which you might be referencing) about almost this exact situation, except it was about black hat SEO dramatically backfiring. Specifically, businesses were asking bloggers and news sites to delete spam comments that linked back to the sites. I believe that would be this great write up on the current situation: http://www.theawl.com/2013/12/the-new-spammer-panic

The problem with this analysis is that those issues are everything. You're basically asking the NYT to redefine itself from the ground up. That's fine. Except why wouldn't it be easier to just start out elsewhere from scratch. "I like that restaurant, it's pretty good. All they need to change are their prices, their decor, their selections, their staff, and their chef... then they'd be great!" Also, this hits a bit too close to reality: http://www.theawl.com/2011/01/the-most-emailed-new-york-times-article-…

I have a decent list of queries I've been collecting data on to compare once word came that a change was rolled out. This is an interesting one that I saw in a comments thread somewhere... http://www.google.com/search?hl=&q=how+to+renew+an+expired+passpor… The Demand Media angle is really interesting too. I love the bit quoted in the Searchengineland article from the CEO, wondering how they got tagged with the "content farm" label. Pretty sure this is where I first saw it... http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/my-summer-on-the-content-farm

Thank you, that was an ear-opening video--I had no idea. I do remember this Awl article from a while back: Some men shoot tigers. Some men love bears. Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, Major in the Yeomanry, Conservative MP for Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, heir to one of the greatest banking fortunes in history, and collector of the largest zoological collection ever amassed in private hands, had a specific and incurable addiction to cassowaries. He bred them. He stuffed them. He gathered living representatives of every known species and sub-species at his parents’ manor house in Hertfordshire. Bewitched by their beautiful and highly variable neck wattles, he identified new species where there were none. He wrote a book, A Monograph of the Genus Casuarius, about them and made excuses for them, and he could never get enough. https://www.theawl.com/2016/04/a-natural-history-of-walter-rothschild/

I recently watched the "Helvetica" documentary that was posted here a few days ago [0], where they briefly mention "Grunge Typography" [1], a seemingly dead-end branch of typography that, for some strange reason, became pretty popular for a short period of time. After some years however, consensus amongst designers formed that what they've created was a pile of illegible garbage, and realized that there was no other way than completely dismiss that branch, go back to the roots, and evolve from a few steps back. I feel the same kind of consensus is slowly forming around ideas like SPAs, client-side rendering and things like CSS-in-JS. We saw the same happen with NoSQL and many other ideas before that. We recently deployed an entire SaaS only using server-side rendering and htmx [2] to give it an SPA-like feel and immediate interactivity where needed. It was a pleasure to develop, it's snappy and we could actually rely on the Browser doing the heavy lifting for things like history, middle click, and not break stuff. I personally highly recommend it and see myself using this approach in many upcoming projects. [0] https://www.hustwit.com/helvetica/ [1] https://www.theawl.com/2012/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-grunge-typography/ [2] https://htmx.org/ (formerly "Intercooler")

Taboola is one of the companies that paid Adblock Plus millions of dollars to not block their ads[0]. Taboola is the billion dollar company shoveling the "mom's $5 wrinkle tip, doctors hate her" trash[1]. Adblock Plus plainly acknowledge that those aren't "acceptable ads"[2], but unfortunately they've handed over the whitelist to a completely, 100% independent committee. It's out of their hands now and they're "hopeful" that those people will remove Taboola soon. There's a thread from 2015 asking them to remove it[3]. Convenient. We both know most people don't spend time reading the options page of their browser extensions. If you download an ad blocker it should block ads. Having to check a check box to get the functionality you paid for is unexpected. Adblock is able to make millions of dollars because most don't know to check it. Most people just want to not see ads, a "selective" ad blocker happens to be the most famous because it was the first popular ad blocker that pivoted into a lucrative rent-seeking operation after becoming a household name. I've heard the euphemism "default opt-in". According to the author of uBlock Origin it uses less resources[4]. Unless you work for Adblock or Adblock Plus or the companies that paid the bribe there is no reason to recommend it. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-microsoft-amazon-taboola-pay-ad… [1] https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/ [2]…

>Fraud? Malware? What does this have to do with adtech? A lot, actually. There are many vectors in which adtech and fraud/malware intermingle: > XSS Attacks: When your website loads HTML into a page without encoding it first, someone can insert HTML script tags that your browser will parse successfully, allowing arbitrary Javascript to execute in your browser. Malicious actors will then usually redirect you to further unsafe pages that will initiate more downloads or (depending on circumstances) compromise your active user session or credentials. All you need is an ad network that didn't take precautions for a malicious ad and you're serving malware to all downstream users. >True Clickbait with a malware payload: Less common nowadays in the sense I mean: Ads that are literally designed for you to click on them, giving the same result as above. We're talking things like "Punch out Osama Bin Laden!" from the early 2000s or "Click here to win a prize!" affairs, where there's no reason a user ought to be clicking on the ad except that they were, quite literally, baited into doing so. >Normal Clickbait with a malware payload Create some "interesting content", that just happens to also do all of the above. Miracle cures, "BIG cost savings", poorly vetted porn-ads, and so on. A lot of internet chum is of this type, and there's a great article analyzing it [1] >Literal Scams: Many ads presented on websites prey on low information individuals, the elderly, or the young, all…

"Chumbox" has been a descriptive term since 2015: "A Complete Taxonomy of Internet Chum" (4 June 2015) <https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/&g… <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox>

You would probably just start seeing worse and worse ads [0]. Legitimate ad accounts would stop bidding on your profile so you'd be left with only scam ads. [0] https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/

Fun Fact: it's been alleged by contemporaries like Jonathan Franzen that DFW fabricated many of these stories, there's a reason they were not published as nonfiction in a magazine with a rigorous fact-check process like the New Yorker. (Which is not to say DFW's "nonfiction" writing is not entertaining or illuminating - it is!) https://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-supposedly-true-thing-jonathan-franze…

A non paywall alternative: https://www.theawl.com/2010/08/the-story-of-connie-converse/

https://www.theawl.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/0yu1y3zKUe9O47ZNx.pn… I think "fake news" has been going on a bit longer than maybe you might realize. The USA started a war with Spain and conquered the Philippine islands over headlines like this in 1898. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)

For meta-funny-spinoff junkies in withdrawal, there's always the Garfield variations https://www.theawl.com/2016/07/the-weird-wonderful-world-of-subversive…

This is from memory, but ISTR people claiming that Wallace's characterizations in essays like "Shipping Out" are mostly fictionalized for (successful!) literary value. Edit: Found it: Franzen thinks that his dialogues were implausible[1]. [1]: https://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-supposedly-true-thing-jonathan-franze…

You are not alone in your struggle with West Elm quality. This blog post describes the 'Peggy truther' community (of people surprised and upset with their Peggy couch): https://www.theawl.com/2017/02/why-does-this-one-couch-from-west-elm-s…

I was going to ask if anyone knew how they found mice for these studies. Do they choose mice they have on hand that naturally have had heart attacks? Would those mice be involved in other studies too? But I ended up googling it and sort of wish I didn’t ask the question. https://www.theawl.com/2016/04/if-you-give-a-mouse-a-heart-attack/