The largest tech companies in the world are selling your attention. At the same time, the internet is the great democratizer, and is giving you access to the vast majority of the world at lightning speed. You can’t possibly read everything on your many screens, and you can’t possibly disconnect completely. What’s a human to do?
This is a very big topic. Today, I’m particularly curious about “browser automation” as a way to create/enforce my own “terms of engagements” with the internet.
Silencing notifications is great defense. Automating with APIs or schedulers is cool. But the reality is that many of the most valuable corners of the internet are out of reach unless you are logged into the app.
Why? Business. (See Sentence 1.)
Why did Google kill Reader? It gives you too much control of your attention, and they need to sell your attention. After completely forgetting about RSS feeds for over a decade (after Google Reader was killed), I am currently testing Feed.ly as a potential mode of “browser automation”. With a subscription, you can even use it to sign up for email lists, to keep newsletters out of your inbox.
I recently got curious about Buffer as a way to automatically post to social media (without me needing to log in.) Even though most social media platforms have an API and from a technical perspective this should be really easy - the social media companies simply don’t want to make it easy to automate posts. This makes sense, because then their job keeping spam out gets harder.
But I simply don’t want to get sucked into a LinkedIn feed rabbit hole every time I want to make a post…and as easy as it sounds to “just have self-control” - I can’t tell you how many times I’ve logged into to post one thing and then woken up an hour later hating myself and seriously doubting my self-worth. (My feed is full of the amazing accomplishments of my friends and peers, which is certainly nice in modest doses, but not something I can easily stop scrolling.)
Not only are APIs annoying to sort out (and even with Buffer it’s not really just “set it and forget it”) - but they change at the whims of their owners. Around the same time that Twitter changed their name to X, they also deprecated a bunch of really useful API features. The changes were so dramatic that some companies needed to shut down completely.
Which brings me to “browser automation”. I’m a complete n00b. I haven’t set up anything cool yet, but I am very curious about trying to use some of these tools as a way of protecting my attention while engaging with parts of the internet that require a “human” UX. The two best tools I’ve found so far are: Axiom.AI & Browse.AI. (Both are my affiliate links which give you a small discount.)
Both Axiom.AI & Browse.AI promise to be able to “create an API for any website”. Right now I’m not particularly interested in scraping, but both seem great for that use case. As a first use case, I’m curious to see if I can just follow this example to post to Facebook from a Google Sheet. (Having an app log into Facebook on my behalf to make the post.)
More to come as I start experimenting! In the meantime, what strategies have you found helpful for gaining more control over your online experiences?