Month: September 2026

Five services I use got worse this year. Not spread over a decade, which I’d have filed under normal churn and forgotten about. All of them inside twelve months, and near enough the same way each time.

YouTube

I held out for years and then crumbled, because the ads had become unwatchable. Two before the video and two more in the middle of a four minute clip. So I pay now. Within months of me starting to pay, they began moving things behind paid channels, which is a separate charge on top of the one I had just agreed to. I paid to remove an obstacle and the obstacle came back at a higher price.

Trakt

I joined on 5 May 2018, at 11:38 on a Saturday morning. I know that because the signup email is still sitting in my mail. Eight years of watch history: everything I’d seen, when I saw it, all of it. Trakt used that data, mine and everybody else’s, to become the company it now is, and then put the result behind a subscription. I cancelled, and the history went with it.

That one is on me. There was an export and I never clicked it. I’d like to claim I didn’t see this coming, except I’ve written the same post five times about other people’s platforms turning out to be a tenancy.

Vinted

They cancelled my account, and then refused to delete my data. That’s the bit I keep coming back to. They get to end it, and they keep the file.

Turns out I’m not unusual. The BBC ran a piece in August about sellers permanently banned for things like relisting a pair of two pound sandals, thousands of people logging the same experience on a site set up specifically to collect it, and support replies that read like they came off a shelf. Before any of that it was already going downhill. The fees are high and they are sold to you as buyer protection, and then there’s nothing much resembling protection on the day something goes wrong.

Grindr

The spam is now so consistent that it qualifies as a format. Same opener, same follow up, small variations on a theme, endlessly.

My suspicion, and I want to be clear that it’s only a suspicion, is that nobody is in a hurry to fix it because the accounts sending it count as users, and daily actives are the number the owners care about. Ownership moved from a Chinese company to American investors and the spam didn’t get better. I can’t show you a line between those two facts. I’d just point out that the version of the app with fewer bots in it reports a smaller number.

easyJet

In August, easyJet agreed a takeover by Apollo, an American private equity firm, at £5.7bn. It hasn’t completed yet and the airline is no worse today than it was in July, so strictly speaking it doesn’t belong on this list.

I’ve put it here because I already know the shape of it. Debt gets loaded onto the thing that was bought, the debt has to be serviced out of whatever that thing does, and for an airline what it does is fees, seat pitch, and how long you wait for a refund.

Two patterns, not one

I’d been treating this as a single phenomenon and it’s really two.

YouTube and Trakt are the first. Grow while free, become the place where the data lives, then charge for access to what people put in. That’s not a betrayal so much as the plan arriving on schedule. Vinted is a variant where the cost isn’t money: the cheapest way to police seventeen million users is automatically, and the false positives are somebody’s livelihood.

Grindr and easyJet are the second. Somebody bought the thing, and now the thing has to earn back what was paid for it.

The part I find harder to be smug about is that in every one of these cases somebody in a meeting made a reasonable case and hit their number. That’s my job. I’ve been in the room where a change that irritates people got signed off, and it wasn’t signed off by villains, it went through because the alternative was a worse quarter.

Where that leaves the domain argument

I wrote in the slow internet post that the useful thing about paying for your own domain is that the bill is in your name. I still think that. It just covers less ground than I was implying. It protects what I write. It does nothing at all for eight years of watch history, a selling account, or a flight I’ve already booked.

So the rule I am left with is duller than the one I’ve been repeating. Export it while you still like them, not on the day you cancel. I didn’t, and the eight years is gone.

Having established that my own Photo Friday page is a 404, I went looking for it in the Internet Archive, and rather a lot of it’s still there. So I have spent an evening pulling it back.

What the archive had

The site was a separate little Movable Type install at 8letters.co.uk/photofriday, with the byline “world”, which I assume was me not understanding the concept of an author field. The first entry, on the 16th of January 2003, reads in full: “New Blog. Coming soon. Not sure when but soon.” I admire the confidence.

Then eight actual entries survive, one a week, each one the challenge word and a photograph:

• 4 April: spring
• 11 April: skin
• 18 April: water
• 9 May: urban
• 16 May: candy
• 23 May: overlooked
• 30 May: transportation
• 6 June: packaging

The March archive page was never crawled, so there may be more. Those are the ones I can prove.

What survived, and the annoying pattern of it

Of eight photographs, three are still in the archive: candy, transportation and packaging. The other five were never captured, so spring, skin, urban, overlooked and water are gone as images.

Here is the irritating part. The three surviving photographs had no accompanying text at all, just the word. The five lost ones are precisely the entries where I wrote something. So what I have is a set of pictures with nothing to say about them, and a set of sentences with nothing to look at.

April, for instance, is entirely text now. On skin I wrote that I love coloured skin, that tattoos are cool and that I couldn’t bring myself to get one. On water: “Okay I had two for today one of me in the shower this morning and then this one. I thought I’d spare you me in the shower ;)”. Both photographs are gone. The offer, I should stress, has expired.

The three that made it

I have republished them here, properly, at their original dates:

• candy, which is a vending machine drawer. Everything in it costs 35p.
• transportation, a London station from above, tracks fanning out into the haze.
• packaging, a heap of padded manila envelopes, several torn open.

None of them is a good photograph. That’s not the point and it never was.

The bit I didn’t expect

The files still carry their original metadata, and it’s more revealing than the pictures.

All three came off a Canon Digital IXUS v2, processed on Mac OS X 10.2.6. And the timestamps are the thing. Candy was taken at 12:29 and posted at 12:32. Transportation was taken at 12:34 and posted at 12:40. Packaging was taken at 09:47 and posted at 09:48.

One minute. I wasn’t selecting from a body of work. I was reading the week’s word, looking around, photographing whatever was in front of me, and putting it up. The vending machine was presumably in whatever building I was standing in. The envelopes were on a shelf. Twenty three years later the metadata makes it obvious that the entire practice was improvised in the ninety seconds before the deadline, which I had forgotten, and which explains a great deal about the vending machine.

That’s also why it worked. There was no bar to clear. A word arrived, you photographed something, you posted it, and several thousand other people did the same on the same afternoon. Nobody was building a portfolio.

Three of eight isn’t a good survival rate, and the only reason it’s not zero is that somebody else archived my site for me. I have spent this year moving things back onto a domain I pay for. Same job, just backwards.

Dinner in a hotel restaurant here, a group of us, plates cleared, that pleasant stage of the evening where nobody is in a hurry. The waitress comes over, entirely friendly, and says:

You’re all gay though, right?

Well. Yes. Obviously yes. Demonstrably, visibly, audibly yes.

I can’t remember what any of us said back, which tells you it can’t have been anything clever. What I remember is the delivery. It wasn’t a nudge, or a bit of banter, or a waitress being daring. It had exactly the tone of somebody confirming that the table wanted the bill split.

A British waitress would sooner walk into traffic. She might spend the whole evening being certain, and would take that certainty to her grave rather than say it out loud at the table. The information would be established entirely through inference and never once acknowledged, which we would all agree afterwards had been the polite way to handle it.

Here it was just a thing that was true, said out loud, on the way to the till.

It’s not the first time

The all time champion remains the makelaar. This was back when I had moved over and my husband was still in London, and I was going round apartments on my own trying to find us somewhere to live.

So I explain the situation. Married, husband still in the UK for now, looking for a place for both of us. And the estate agent asks, with no edge to it whatsoever, whether we’re in an open marriage.

Reader, I laughed. Partly at the question and partly at the total absence of any sense that it might be a question you wouldn’t ask a client you had met twenty minutes earlier.

And in fairness to her, from a housing point of view it wasn’t entirely irrelevant. Two names or one, two people living here or one, is a legitimate thing for a makelaar to want settled. She had simply gone at it directly instead of circling for ten minutes hoping I’d volunteer it.

I have written before about how long it took me to stop hearing Dutch directness as rudeness. These are the two exchanges I think of whenever it comes up, because neither of them was remotely rude. Both were somebody establishing a fact they wanted, in one sentence, and then moving on with their day.

Nine years in and I still couldn’t do it. But I’ve stopped flinching, so that’s something.