What Is a Dickover?

Gruber's usually too much of a walking Apple ad for my taste, but I love this.

We need to define the things we hate. Give them words. Use the words as weapons.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently with "watermarks" of the statistical and non-visible kind used to track image creators. (Google embedding "this image is AI but also here's the user ID".)

I've been thinking that practice needs a new word too. It's not watermarking, it's signals-math based tracking, so maybe sigtracked.

That might not sound gross enough though.

> Cookie permissions are unnecessary. Signing up for an email newsletter is unnecessary.

They are necessary, as in: without them the creator perhaps wouldn’t be able to justify running the website.

As long as users visit websites with poor ux and show no preference versus websites with good ux, there will reliably be websites with poor ux.

I don't get why people feel entitled to _not_ get dickovers. Are you paying for what you're using, to a sufficient degree that the ecosystem can work without the dickover being presented to you?

This shouldn't be the user's problem, but this is the market working. The dickovers are there because someone somewhere is making money because the dickovers are there. Saying you want the content without the spam is more or less saying you want other people to do the work and you don't want to pay for it.

If you don't like ads/dickovers, you don't have to use the site/app. The provider has decided you're not worth it. To be fair, you probably aren't making them money.

There are exceptions, but you shouldn't feel entitled to use the thing without paying the "dickover price" that the provider has decided to charge.