Consumer. Act!

Ok. I’ve had it. I’m using decent browsers and var­i­ous leave-me-alone plu­g­ins, but nev­er­the­less I some­times get popup, stu­pid noisy flash com­mer­cials etc. Using tabbed brows­ing and an aggre­ga­tor set to just open links (in the back­ground) in what­ever window’s at the top of the stack means that I just had to close 15+ win­dows with use­ful infor­ma­tion (now marked as read in my aggre­ga­tor) as I couldn’t nav­i­gate. Thank you Dell.

I could decide just not to visit sites uti­liz­ing these tech­niques — or I could com­plain my ass off to the com­pa­nies buy­ing into that form of adver­tis­ing. Which is what I plan to do (although I might go for option #1 as well).

They are break­ing my web expe­ri­ence, con­se­quently mak­ing me wanna spend less time brows­ing the pages where they could grab my atten­tion — if they did in a respect­ful man­ner, that is.

Would I buy stuff from a street ven­dor that started off by mak­ing me trip over his leg? Would I buy a shirt from a guy that started shout­ing directly in my face as I entered the store? No way in hell.

So I’m think­ing of putting up a form, easy to fill out with the details of the type of adver­tis­ing (ban­ners mostly), time and place. And a drop-down for select­ing where to send the com­plaint. A stan­dard email, some­thing like:

“Dear Dell, I’m sure you mean well, but your adver­tis­ing is mess­ing with my user expe­ri­ence and make me want to make an effort not buy­ing any­thing from you.

On [date] at [web­site] I was treated with your [type] adver­tis­ing [product/service] which [how it was annoying].

You treat me dis­re­spect­fully? As a con­sumer, I can only voice my opin­ion / pun­ish you by not buy­ing. Which is what I’ll do if you don’t stop this stu­pid form of shout­ing. This mes­sage is cross­posted to my own weblog as a way of mak­ing my peers real­ize that they shoudn’t buy any­thing from you.
Best regards [name]”

I hon­estly think it’s lack of respect buy­ing into a space in way that messes up what I was plan­ning of doing. Dell for instance just made me waste 3 min­utes as I now have to go through a list of links, find the rel­e­vant stuff, open it in new win­dows. Because they wanted to sell me some­thing I wasn’t even pre­pared to buy.

You want to ben­e­fit of being on the web? You bet­ter learn the eti­quette.

Tags: con­sumerism