This is a great response and I’m glad to have read it. However I think you miss one important disadvantage of your approach: These alternatives are mostly blacklists, and so they become less useful as you get further into the less-trafficked corners of the web, which is also where you’re most likely to hit, e.g., invisible compromised resources.
I’ve also been surprised at how little “whitelist fatigue” I’ve gotten. I would have naively expected to get tired of whitelisting domains, but in practice it’s continued to feel freeing rather than obnoxiously attention consuming, and site functionality is almost always easy / obvious to enable properly. It’s possible that sometimes I miss intended functionality, but I doubt that this comes close to outweighing the benefits.
Edit: the following paragraph misunderstands Said’s comment and doesn’t address the point that it was meant to; apologies.
Finally, I don’t buy the argument about incentivizing web authors. If trackers work less well, there is obviously less incentive to use them. If the only thing holding back authors from adding trackers willy-nilly is user annoyance at page bloat, then it’s clearly not enough, and so telling people to just go on shouldering that annoyance to ensure that the annoyance is minimized seems like privileging second-order effects that I would expect to be small.
telling people to just go on shouldering that annoyance to ensure that the annoyance is minimized
With respect, please re-read my comment, because not only did I not say anything like this, I specifically pointed out that I am not saying anything like it!
Furthermore, the argument from incentives was not specifically (or even mostly) about trackers; it was about bloat in website design / features. Frankly, it does not seem to me like you have given due consideration to what I wrote in that section of my comment…
However I think you miss one important disadvantage of your approach: These alternatives are mostly blacklists, and so they become less useful as you get further into the less-trafficked corners of the web, which is also where you’re most likely to hit, e.g., invisible compromised resources.
This is an interesting counterpoint, certainly. I am curious to what extent this is true in practice, and whether you make this claim on the basis of experience, or supposition; do you have examples?
This is a great response and I’m glad to have read it. However I think you miss one important disadvantage of your approach: These alternatives are mostly blacklists, and so they become less useful as you get further into the less-trafficked corners of the web, which is also where you’re most likely to hit, e.g., invisible compromised resources.
I’ve also been surprised at how little “whitelist fatigue” I’ve gotten. I would have naively expected to get tired of whitelisting domains, but in practice it’s continued to feel freeing rather than obnoxiously attention consuming, and site functionality is almost always easy / obvious to enable properly. It’s possible that sometimes I miss intended functionality, but I doubt that this comes close to outweighing the benefits.
Edit: the following paragraph misunderstands Said’s comment and doesn’t address the point that it was meant to; apologies.
Finally, I don’t buy the argument about incentivizing web authors. If trackers work less well, there is obviously less incentive to use them. If the only thing holding back authors from adding trackers willy-nilly is user annoyance at page bloat, then it’s clearly not enough, and so telling people to just go on shouldering that annoyance to ensure that the annoyance is minimized seems like privileging second-order effects that I would expect to be small.
With respect, please re-read my comment, because not only did I not say anything like this, I specifically pointed out that I am not saying anything like it!
Furthermore, the argument from incentives was not specifically (or even mostly) about trackers; it was about bloat in website design / features. Frankly, it does not seem to me like you have given due consideration to what I wrote in that section of my comment…
This is an interesting counterpoint, certainly. I am curious to what extent this is true in practice, and whether you make this claim on the basis of experience, or supposition; do you have examples?
You’re right; I’m sorry that I didn’t read your comment sufficiently carefully.
The reasoning there is purely my expectation and isn’t based on data or particular experience.