vera grey :verifiedplural: (@[email protected])

hot take: my aggressive use of ad-blockers and notification filters is a health accommodation my constellation of health issues means that any kind of distraction makes it difficult to go back to the thing i’ve been distracted from. each new stimulus is increasingly frustrating, and just serves to pull me away from doing anything at all which means that modern computing is an incredibly hostile place: any link i click is a roulette wheel of ads, cookie notices, newsletter signups, support chat popups, and god knows what else. apps on my phone beg for notification permission so they can insert advertisements into my day-to-day life, they flash promotional material alongside the actually useful thing you downloaded it for, they change out their interface design on a whim. i have an Apple Watch, to remind me to stand up while i work my desk job and otherwise avoid becoming even more sedentary. i only allow three kinds of notifications on my watch: health/activity-related notifications like stand and med reminders, texts from my partner, and notifications about flight delays. nothing else is so important as to steal my attention in the most intimate way i allow. but the Apple Watch settings assume that any new app that gains notification permissions should be sent to my watch, which means i have to remember to turn those off every time i add a new app to my phone with notifications, or have my attention stolen from me by some fuckoff who decided that the same medium i use to remember to take my pills or hear from my spouse can be used to ask me to buy more books, or listen to some random bullshit on the expensive radio, or buy some random tchotchkes, or subscribe to my fucking cat food dispenser. so i have to choose: either put up with this bullshit, or recuse myself from an otherwise genuinely useful service. and more often i choose the latter, because it’s usually not worth the bullshit tax. (it’s why i don’t play a lot of games on my phone - a lot of them nowadays are vehicles for in-app purchases or funnels to make you watch ads to sidestep an artificial roadblock, and the experience has soured my perception against the genuinely good ones.)