Rich and Paul talk about the original sins of the web. Sin #1: Web pages track you everywhere, all over your life, and it's frankly hurtful.

Hi, I'm Paul Ford.

I'm the c e O of a board,

and I'm Rich Citi, president and co-founder of a board.

We

gave each other titles because we're starting to talk to the

world more, and that's really important.

When you talk to

So what you guys, again?

I'm the c e o and you're the president.

Let's get to titles in a future episode.

I, I don't, I don't think that that's where my brain's at right now.

I think what we should talk about, because we have a product that is

about making the internet better for people as they manage their own data.

Okay?

Uh, we should talk about where we're coming from in a broad way.

What's wrong with the internet today as we see

A lot of people have written a lot of things, articles, books, 60

Minutes talking about internet, turning your brain into mush, blah, blah, blah.

We're gonna take a little more,

that voice, that the voice of the 60 minute, and

they're not gonna gonna do it

60 minutes from 40 years

I'm Marley Scher.

Yeah.

Okay.

we're not gonna get into like, you know,

Misinformation

and the social media stuff.

We're gonna talk a little bit about that, but we're, it's kind of be a

little different in terms of what frustrates us about the internet.

frame it for this conversation, right.

So there are these subjects that the media comes back to, and because it's,

we spend so much time on social media collectively, and Facebook and so on.

but those are not really the web.

They use web technologies and they're, they, they are often experienced as

apps or web pages, but they're kind of often their own little world.

They're not designed as information.

They're not designed for sharing.

They want you to bring everything in and not let anything come out again,

and so put all that stuff to the side.

That's its own world.

Everybody talks

about, we'll touch on it, but it's not the core of what we're gonna

about, let's talk, just like we were talking

about Wikipedia and Wiki data.

Let's talk about the web that is still out there.

Everybody's like, nah, there's none.

The web's gone, man.

It's just social media.

It's just, just apps.

Now, the web that's still out there, I'll give you an example.

Real estate, you want to go find a place to live in.

Zillow, Trulia, you go to all those sites, those are web pages,

they have data on them, they

They have mm-hmm.

they

their data from other places, et cetera, et cetera.

So that web is still out there.

That is still, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say one thing and then I want to throw it back

to you, which is, I remember once having a conversation with somebody who worked

at Google and we were, I was, I was in the media and I was talking about like,

you know, kind of, how do you all see the.

and they, um, the answer ultimately came down to something like, it's about 9%.

It's tiny.

When you say media, you mean like

the new, the New York Times and CNN and all the, so that when you

are in the media, you think that the web exists to publish pages that you create.

sliver.

It's a distribution platform for news and information, right?

So obviously the media is the most important thing.

You didn't even get, you didn't even crack 10%.

Now you're talking about this little tiny baby.

When, when real estate though, who doggies because that is trillions and

trillions of dollars get transacted every year around real estate.

Whereas Covid media industry fits into like one quarter of Google's profits.

So, so this is, so, it's a very difficult way to look at the world cuz

we're so used to kind of a certain bias in, in like, well obviously people go

on there to get the news every day.

Dad's looking at the, looking at the

we are.

Um, but there's a few things worth noting.

First off, you're, you're not making a big transaction to get the news.

No.

In fact, you're making tons of micro-transactions against ad

networks, or you paid for one

or you subscribe to something, which by the way,

you're still, you're, there's still a bunch of microtransactions.

Even if you subscribe to something, it's the same.

It's

explain that because I think that's a way that you and

I see the world as old we hams.

That doesn't get out to the world very much.

When, when you say transaction, what do you mean?

So there is value in observing my behavior and drawing

a profile of what, who I am, what I'm interested in, what my income,

pro income profile is where I live.

That's incredibly valuable

is somebody who, you know, he bought a car two years ago.

He is somebody who probably in the next like three years might

start looking for another car.

exactly right.

That's exactly so that the actions I.

on the internet are, uh, observed, packaged up, and then sold on

There are 36 trillion tiny elves with tiny notebook.

Watching watching and they write down the, they write it down and

then they send it in a letter and it gets saved in a database.

Like just think about like gremlins everywhere

collected and then that data, because what would you pay for a

mortgage,

potential future mortgage customer?

And this is the thing, when you actually get to these

numbers, I don't have a real number, but it could be like $5,000.

Yeah.

I mean the total acquisition cost from the beginning of the journey all the

way to like we landed it is hundreds or thousands of dollars be why?

Because I'm gonna pay an interest on that loan.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on how much, how expensive

and everything has been sort of modeled out and every margin is well

understood enough in these businesses that they're like, we're gonna spend a

hundred thousand dollars to make $105,000,

And

but we'll do it a million times.

And so this is the first of a series.

I wanna bring this back to a board.

We're gonna, we're

first of a series of

How many?

So this is the first of three podcasts where we complain to

you and share with you what we think is tough and difficult and often kind

of just demoralizing about using the internet and how it can be better.

Um, and so the first is, and this isn't about ads by the way, because

all of the stuff we just described all.

All that transactional data that gets passed along on markets, in

markets where they sell your behaviors to others doesn't necessarily

mean it's a cluttered experience where there's a lot of ads on it.

In fact, it's very invisible, but people know and they know, and what

it leads to is a terrible sense of not really being in control.

Of your experience, uh, that every step you're taking is kind of, will

my foot go through the floor this time or will I keep walking forward?

Well, and the experiences are really bad, right?

So you go on, you do a Google search.

You buy, let's say you buy, um, oh, you buy an end table on Wayfair?

Right Now the internet has decided, oh, you had one end table.

Oh, they're like heroine.

You're gonna need like 50 more end tables.

Or if they're smarter, they're like, okay, you got an end table.

There's probably a 30% chance you need a mattress.

And then, and then these ad show up and they have

that little tiny X on the top.

Right.

And it's like, learn about your ad choices.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just, it's the smuggest guy, it's the smu, Hey, do you

know about your ad choices?

I'd love to share them with you.

And you're, you click on it and you're like, this is horrible.

What's interesting about the, the, the general internet experience

today is that it's, you know, they've tried giving you sort of these speed bumps

that tell you that this is happening.

No one.

Everyone ignores them.

I think GDPR is kind of this bizarre speed bump in your experience.

Nobody cares anymore.

Also, what better way to summarize just the total submission to

the experience than accept?

All right.

I mean, that's where we are.

And so, and, and I think people have come to terms with the lack of power.

You know the greatest bit about unin intentional branding

on Earth is the word cookie.

It sounds nice.

Oh, hey, you're giving me a cookie.

Uh oh.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, Yeah, it should be called like face liquor.

Hey, we're gonna give you some, would you accept five or six face licks?

Yes.

From Zillow?

Yeah.

And look, there are tools out there

you

do some research, how do I, you know, actually Apple is pretty proactive.

They made, they've made moves that have pissed off Facebook and

You know what's funny though?

There's certain sites I'm noticing just don't work on Safari anymore because

I've turned on to like, block my X, y, Z.

You can really be aggressive with

And, and they're like, I don't know who you are.

Yeah.

And I'm like, I just wanna see the information.

They're like, no, no,

it just breaks.

yeah.

They don't, they don't.

Apple is a little bit of war with the web.

Sometimes good, often, uh, often really good and sometimes a little bit

like, Hey Apple, what, what you doing?

And, and people who are tech savvy, there are other tools

that you can just sort of kick in that really aggressively anonymizes

you, makes it hard to track you.

So talk about something near and dear to your heart, your pie hole.

Most people won't know what I said and they'll think it's kind of dirty.

So why don't you explain what that

So Pie Hole is a, is a, uh, piece of software.

It's essentially, it's a DNS server that you could set up on a raspberry pie.

So a little $35 computer, little baby computer,

but it's actually pretty

powerful.

Yeah.

Nothing.

plug it into your network.

And then what you do is you tell your router, this is the DNS server, not

the typical one that you usually use.

And what it does is when your computer asks for a website, it hits the pie

hole first and says, can I come in?

And pie hole has, I think about a hundred thousand domains.

Okay?

So beep boop, that's all robot talk.

But when I look at the webpage, what do

I

Uh, a lot less ads, but this is what you really see.

There's plenty of ad blockers out there.

It is blazing

right?

Cuz it doesn't even let the ads get near your computer.

It's like you guys wait outside,

nor

does it let the trackers, which are invisible but are very, very heavy

on the payload that's coming in.

They don't even make

it.

Okay.

So when you have a pie hole installed on your network outside your front

door, 90 million tiny gremlins are sitting there knocking, door

and you're like, I don't care.

I'm reading the New York Times.

Best of luck to you.

It's a hell of an experience.

why doesn't everybody have one of these?

the technical overhead's annoying.

Okay, cuz this seems like it would solve the broader problem you're

Yeah.

Nobody wants to install little boxes on their

networks,

think.

I think this real, I think this is a nerd only

solution.

There's another issue though it like you, you often run into stuff you

don't want to break that breaks.

Yeah.

It can be hard to like buy a product.

It can be, you could just hit weird walls.

Like I like, yeah, Google search is kind of onerous these days, but

sometimes I want to click on the search result and I can't even do that.

No, the, the web is built on an infrastructure

of spyware and nasty gremlin.

It just is.

just is.

And so it can be overly aggressive.

It's just not the right solution.

Right.

Okay.

So not, okay, so we can't solve it there.

Okay.

What do you do?

Well, let's look around the web and are there some good

places where it doesn't feel so icky?

uh, wichip.

I mean, Wikipedia is the shining light on the

internet.

There's

a lot of, I mean, it's, it's the most sometimes

challenging and difficult.

Human beings came together and wrote really good encyclopedia

It serves the world every second of every day.

Yes.

And with good information that is not colored by self-interest

or other biases by design.

by well, and by vigorous community.

vigorous community polic.

So it is effectively this canonical information source that's, That's ad free.

Let's not get into the donation box that literally pums the rest

of the page, but that's temporary.

they used to show Jimmy Whales big face?

I used to get emails.

Okay.

Wait, wait, wait.

That's a glorious

Why do you think I, I have a theory about why Wikipedia.

I'd love to hear it.

It's not, it's, first of all, there's merit in making something of

value for the world, et cetera, et cetera.

But if you look at it, it's a community.

It's people who like to work together on this thing.

And a lot of them, I think when you look at it, some people it's

just like, ah, this is a great way to blow a couple hours.

I have a little extra time in my brain.

For some people, it's like, this is where I can function the

best as a human being for real.

Like I, I'm, I'm gonna do all these pages about.

feels really good to be helpful to

That's, that's right.

And so like, and then somebody comes in and is like, this Pokemon

is non notable and it a war erupts.

Right.

And that's okay.

That's the process.

Yeah, that's society.

But there is, the byproduct here is, uh, this place that is always additive

and free from hidden agendas, right?

There

The agendas are right there on the talk page.

They're right there on the page.

Right?

So what you have here is a great example.

Ch, you know, walking that fine line of something positive in the world.

Are we building a.org?

We are not, and I don't, can you have a great

Be a hell of a it.

Be hell of a reveal after that we bought the domain

game?

Yes, that's right.

We, we b board.com is in our hands.

I'm gonna give you an example though, of one that also makes

money and is totally commercial.

Cause we've been talking kind of do-gooder so far that um, is a nice

counter example, but I think speaks volumes about people's hum people's

I have genuine trepidation.

I'm curious what you're gonna come up with?

Pinterest.

Oh, alright.

Okay.

Pinterest makes money.

If I put a lot of drapes on a mood board.

does Pinterest make money?

Oh, they.

Stuff that I didn't pin

hey, you like watches?

I like watches and I get watch ads alongside my board that has,

uh, watches that I've saved on the

curtains, Yeah, sneakers.

And so again, why, why does this work and why isn't

it a sloppy mess and toxic?

Uh, again, it is a tool that lets you effectively.

Lift what you value in the internet and put it someplace

else so you can have your own

Less about community, though.

There's a little bit of community.

You can share boards with other people, but it's less about community,

it's more about personal control

All right, so what above all else?

So what you're saying, what are you saying?

You're saying that the web can be kind of toxic and that websites

that are focused on tracking your behavior and getting value out of it

I'm gonna end this.

What are you saying?

What I'm saying is, The relentless march of automation and

AI and algorithms, right, uh, has led us to push the humans to the side.

And the truth is we've solved a lot of technical challenges, but

we have not solved the challenge of community and human empathy.

I wanna coin a phrase for you, Paul.

We might use it in the aboard marketing.

We might not.

I just came up with it.

You ready?

What's the phrase?

Coin away?

Coin.

Hi.

H i, not ai, h i, human intelligence.

Oh, Jesus

Do you see what I did?

It also is a synonym for Hello.

Silicon Valley craves getting that human out of the loop.

and I, I don't actually find that that exciting or interesting

when I'm building something.

I am very curious as to what people make of things and how they use them.

So that's, that is, okay.

So we're making big points about how the web is broken.

How is the web broken?

The experience is, has crowded out your own motivations

and intentions and let in everyone else's such that it's a mine.

It's not for you anymore.

It's not for you anymore, and you have no control.

And these examples that we just shared represent places where clear lines have

been drawn and humans where given control

It is true.

Wikipedia is about a group of individuals asserting control

compared to the rest of the web.

Correct.

All right, so there we go.

That's problem number one.

Yes.

Let's be clear.

This is website about a board.

We have an approach.

We're gonna be addressing these problems with the software we're building.

We were excited to show it to you, but as we're getting ready for that big, big.

Yep.

We're

gonna talk about the problems a little bit

next time.

Paul, we're gonna talk about good or bad, we talked about a lot of the bad

and the bad intentions on the internet.

Good or bad, the internet can be very overwhelming,

Boy

and how do you carve out the stuff that you value?

And make it a calmer place for you.

Sounds great.

Check us out@aboard.com.

But don't read the website too carefully cuz we're changing

We really are, but the design will kind of stay the same.

So you

we love the happy people on the page.

it in visually and send us an email to hello@aboard.com.

We're glad to hear from you.

Have a lovely day.