Why do people write things and put them on the Internet, then make it hard for others to read them? Or hard to share? Or hard to comment on?
OK, I understand a bit the large print publications that are trying to find a way to stay alive and stay profitable. But I’m talking about some of the average people who find it necessary to put pop-up displays, or have designs that make it difficult to read a single article, or have RSS feeds that only display a few words of the article. (Yeah, I know… I’m getting technical)
It’s not easy for us 20th-century types to grasp the new paradigms of the digital age. I guess that’s a big part of it. We’re worried that others will steal our ideas, misuse our words, or write abusive things on our sites. They will. But that’s part of getting your thoughts out there. When you make it hard for others to share your words with others, you limit your audience. When you make your site difficult to access, people will go elsewhere where they can find similar thoughts more easily. When you make it hard to participate, you lose those who would contribute to your site.
There will be intellectual thieves. There will be Internet trolls. There will be malicious individuals.
And there will be those that will read your ideas and grow from them. There will be those that will interact with you and help you to sharpen your thinking.
And that’s what it’s all about.
The thing about the RSS feeds is simple. It began because people had ads on their websites and those ads don’t get viewed if someone can read the entire article from their news reader. Others do it because they just don’t know any better. Lots of bloggers don’t even know people read their sites using RSS because they don’t use it themselves–they just go to the site they want to read and scroll through it. P.S. I’ve been using one RSS reader or another for about 10 years now.
The designs that make it difficult to read are just because of poor web design. They latch onto some color scheme that they think is really pretty or cool without bothering to think about how hard it is to read.
The pop-ups, well those are usually ads, once again. Almost all pop-ups can be blocked with the right tool.
So, I don’t think it has anything to do with protecting your words or being shy about being seen or being afraid someone is going to plagiarize you. It’s just honest mistakes, or in the case of the ads, wanting to make a little money from your hobby.
Some of that’s true, Alan. But I visit sites that won’t let you copy and paste, or insist on express permission to be able to share their material. Some attend text to anything that you quote from them. A lot of that is just misguided.
True. The blocking copy & paste really annoys me, but it’s easy to bypass. Some of it is also because they just don’t understand how the internet and attribution works. There is a lot of what I guess you’d call jealousy when it comes to guarding one’s works, but then again, the internet is full of thieves and plagiarists.