Finding Online Help
I have been using RSS to follow a few Reddit computer related forums. The RSS feeds have helped me learn and keep pace with software and practices.
My responsibilities at work have me continually learning new topics. I simply do not know the answers to many of the projects we start. Much research is required. I spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to find foundational information before starting a project. The RSS feeds help with that but only to a certain point.
The general online user forums are not a good place to find such information. Most of these forums are just users helping users. A great move forward for humanity but frustrating to anybody needing information from a business or enterprise perspective.
To help with that I decided to start posting questions on the Reddit forums.
I was dismayed and flabbergasted to discover how much the site is Google dependent, the lords of data mining and tracking.
Posting a new question on Reddit is impossible without enabling JavaScript for several Google URLs. The primary problem is the stupid “I am not a robot” captcha, which is hosted on gstatic.com. Allowing JavaScript for the Google sites seems to be necessary only for starting a thread and does not seem to be needed to reply to an existing post.
I do not have and never will have any Google accounts. Momentarily enabling JavaScript to post a question is not going to amount to significant data mining and tracking. Nonetheless, disheartening.
The stackexchange collection of sites are no different. Very Google dependent. Not to forget that the moderators are an incredibly anal bunch with all of their rules, downvoting, and pontificating.
There are times when a person must decide between ideology and practicality. I detest such moments. There are days when I want to just pull the plug and not be connected at all.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: General
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