The Online Hymen

Everywhere you look these days, there are barriers to entry. With the concerted attacks being made against Net Neutrality, there is a good chance that such barriers are only going to become greater and more intimidating. In the online world, such barriers were hard to put in place at the start because the technology to do so did not exist. The explosion of the web certainly benefitted from the underlying transports being new and not fully informed. Net Neutrality itself was de facto in that Quality of Service restraints, which can now be used to set preferential traffic, were still in vitro, quietly gestating as a way of improving different types of traffic like voice over IP. It seems often the way of it that a generally good idea like QoS should deliver the walking abortion that seeks to axe the mostly neutral net.

But it is not just on such a grand scale that barriers are developing, becoming more and more thorny. I will be covering the general issue in a longer piece that looks at the expectation commerce has that all things must serve their commercial ends, but for the moment, it is worth taking an example from the world of online spam and news analysis.

Even with the most robust of spam filters, all email users have to put up with a certain amount of junk email. And by the way, if you do not receive any spam at all, the chances are you are also missing emails you want to see. An inevitable part of using the net involves authenticating yourself in one place or another and most of us get that this is a trade off: we are given subsidized access to information and we end up on a mailing list that may eventually lead to email we do not want.

It is a balance.

The problem I find is when I receive a newsletter as part of one such signing up and it is full of snippets of articles with “Read More” links. When I do click the article I am taken to a website that insists on knowing more about me, which includes forcing me to re-enter the email address that just received the article link. Before I can see the article that has been teased, I have to give my name and address, sometimes even my telephone number. If I only had a passing interest in the subject, I give up at this point. Of late, however, even if the information is important to me, I have taken to not only turning away but also immediately removing myself from the subscription list.

Perhaps this sounds a little like I am cutting off my nose to spite my face or some other equally inane cliche but I already pay to be on the net. In fact, I pay for my net multiple times: for my office, my phone and my home. Plus, you already have some of the details that you are asking me to reenter and my time is just as valuable as yours. Making me reenter information tells me that you want me but don’t respect me and much like many a cheap whore, I expect a little better.

But wasting my time is not the key reason I turn away. The main one is that I simply do not trust you. I don’t trust you to protect my information. I don’t trust you to give me a mostly unbiased viewpoint on the topic itself. I don’t even trust that you are expert enough to be giving advice on the subject. A shiny website with a less than stellar sign up process provides me with no confidence as to your bona fides at all.

Of late, at least for those subjects where I consider myself reasonably informed, I find it more useful to spend my time searching for the passionate write up from a non-corporate than read your slanted barely disguised infomercial. And for those areas where I am less than expert, your “sign up gate” is distinctly off-putting, dousing my ardor before I even have a hard on.