See bottom for addendum on this story. Pgm fixes have made this a useful product for me.
Boomer rant of the moment.
Medium writers have options to use add-ons near the bottom of their posts. It could be the signup for the Medium thing where writers get some kind of future cut-in on revenue, maybe sign up for a pub or personal email list among other add-ons. Fine. I don’t know if the ‘Knowable’ pitch is optional or random, I suspect it’s now optional for writers to include. So being an old boomer dumbass I decided to click on some Medium author’s ‘Knowable’ pitch near the bottom of their story, as I hazily remember doing this a while ago probably when I saw the pitch on my daily email feed from Medium.com when the Knowable app was being introduced.
On the desktop I arrived at the Knowable pitch in a new chrome tab, and as readers may note in the title picture the top word appears hacked off on my desktop browser version for this pitch.
Begin rant here. So Knowable is some form of audible reader for Medium.com stories that readers can access, using some form of ‘freemium’ hook and yank method thus enhancing someone’s online revenue stream somewhere. Fine. I’d point out that maybe some apps like this don’t sport a lot of bells and whistles but other audible reader extensions exist for this same function in the chrome browser. I’d also point out apps like Amazon’s Audible app have existed for over a decade now and as long as readers are in the Amazon corral of apps and devices, they have a huge chunk of the listening mobile market as well as other audible apps available for readers.
The ‘Listen.’ word hacked off in the desktop ad pitch version for Knowable is what I’m slightly pissed off about today. Not a biggy, no but us boomers must rant about some things in this wokie world we still exist in. If there is one thing I dislike it’s electronic mobile anything, mostly the micro-screens, I mean the electronics industry has convinced the younger gens that this is the only way to experience anything on the countries networks. Yeah, run around all day every day with these tiny plastic slabs of ads. Ads ads ads, to me that is the whole ecosphere of mobile computing, and okay, to me I guess tablets are slightly better due to their visual real estate. I don’t have as many effective ad blockers and trackers on mobile as I do on the desktop. I can’t imagine using the desktop without ad and tracking blockers. Anyway, I’m saying that the ‘knowable’ ad was first and foremost designed for the mobile crowd, due to the lack of oversight in the quality control dept. of whoever whipped up this knowable pitch to begin with. I get it, the mobile crowd is much more likely to use an audible app on the run, and no doubt around the world active mobile devices must way outnumber desktop people such as this old boomer.
So this is the trend, dev efforts vastly favor mobile platforms mostly due to the vast number of mobile users compared to the demographics of desktop users. I don’t care! If you devs can’t show a little quality control in producing pitches on the desktop then please keep the heck out of the desktop space. Thank you lovely readers.
End today’s boomer rant.
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Necessary addendum:
March 23, 2022: Must add since Medium.com added the listen to functionality to every post in the feed, I use it when I get behind to catch up on too many posts that tend to crop up. It’s now a useful feature to me.
