Episode 12 Why did the Internet become such a bad place?

This conversation explores the growing frustration of everyday digital experiences, from intrusive product updates and clunky billing flows to unintuitive meeting tools, overlapping tooltips, forced mobile apps, and the increasing burden of proving you are human online.

Along the way, the discussion connects those small irritations to larger patterns: concentrated market power, weak customer service, poor interface design, platform lock-in, and an economy built around capturing attention. The result is a broader reflection on how convenience, advertising, and scale have reshaped the internet into something that often feels less usable than it should.

Episode Show Notes:

• Emanuel and Kevin reflect on how the internet increasingly creates friction instead of reducing it.
• Discussion of user experience issues across software tools, ecommerce, streaming, payments, and communication platforms.
• Examples include StreamYard notifications, Amazon shopping flows, Amazon Prime video usability, Zoom meeting controls, WordPress complexity, Grammarly overlays, ClickUp interface frustrations, Xoom and Zelle payment risks, and app-only utility payments.
• Conversation about how companies offload work onto users while reducing customer service.
• Discussion of phishing emails, scams, CAPTCHA fatigue, poor invoice naming, and confusing transaction labels.
• Broader themes include concentration of market power, the attention economy, clickbait, platform lock-in, and the lack of shared standards across digital systems.
• Kevin mentions a Norwegian consumer advocacy group commercial about deliberate friction and poor design online.

Episode Timestamps:

• 00:00 Introduction and episode setup
• 00:01 Is the internet better or worse than it used to be?
• 00:02 User experience frustration as the core theme
  
• 00:02 StreamYard pop-ups and forced product updates
  
• 00:04 Small annoyances versus bigger systemic problems
  
• 00:05 Large companies, online dependency, and weak customer service
  
• 00:06 Self-checkout, Amazon AI assistant, and Prime video frustrations
  
• 00:09 Bad UX, hospital self-check-in, and telecom billing workflows
  
• 00:11 The internet as an enabler of company-driven friction
  
• 00:12 Digital work, tool overload, and WordPress complexity
  
• 00:15 Zoom usability and why intuitive interfaces are hard to build
  
• 00:18 Expectations, best practices, and business exceptions
  
• 00:19 Bluetooth headphone frustrations and inconsistent product design
  
• 00:22 Tooltips, link previews, Grammarly, ClickUp, and password managers
  
• 00:23 Xoom, Zelle, and cumulative layout frustrations
  
• 00:25 Forced apps, utility payments, and accessibility concerns
  
• 00:27 Phishing emails, scams, and basic online safety habits
  
• 00:29 Attention as a commodity and why outrage wins online
  
• 00:31 Design blind spots and who technology gets tested for
  
• 00:33 CAPTCHA fatigue and proving you are human online
  
• 00:34 Invoice naming, bookkeeping, and transaction clarity
  
• 00:36 Why social media needs shared standards
  
• 00:37 Platform lock-in, communication protocols, and global app habits
  
• 00:39 Playing music in 2026 and the loss of simple local options
  
• 00:41 Bloat, updates, and building custom tools out of frustration
  
• 00:43 Norwegian consumer advocacy ad about intentional bad design
  
• 00:44 Closing

Episode Links:

A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

Entities mentioned in this episode

Episode Topic Entities:

Internet
user experience
UX
UI
attention economy
customer service
social media standards
platform lock-in
phishing emails
online scams
CAPTCHA
digital tools
software updates
workflow friction

Brand and Platform Entities:

StreamYard
Amazon
Walmart
Amazon Prime
WordPress
Wix
Squarespace
Webflow
Shopify
Zoom
OrganicGrowth.biz
WordCamp
Grammarly
ClickUp
Xoom
PayPal
Zelle
Cloudflare
Google
Chrome
Facebook
Meta
Alphabet
Apple
AOL
Twitter
X
Mastodon
Bluesky
WeChat
YouTube
Spotify
Pandora
Linux
CapCut
Descript
Google Workspace
Microsoft
FrontPage
ChatGPT

Technology and Product Entities:

AI assistant
Brutus
self-checkout
Bluetooth headphones
VPN
Android
iPhone
CSS
email
social media
agentic web
MP3
SMS
Winamp
Music
workplace dashboard
plugins

Geographic Entities:

Canada
Europe
North America
US
Asia
Norway

About the Podcast:

Hosted by Kevin Carney and Emanuel Petrescu, two curious minds exploring ideas, culture, and everything in between. Curious Pundits is a conversational podcast where each episode starts with a topic that caught our attention and unfolds into thoughtful, unscripted discussion. We follow curiosity wherever it leads, across disciplines, opinions, and perspectives, without pretending to have all the answers. Their main ventures are https://1307.digital/ (Emanuel) and https://organicgrowth.biz/ (Kevin).

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Announcer: This is the Curious Pundits Podcast hosted by Kevin and Emmanuel. They explore bits of everything through thoughtful conversations, prioritizing curiosity over conclusions, and they thank you for joining them now onto the podcast.

[00:00:18] Emanuel: Hi everyone. My name is Emanuel.

[00:00:21] Kevin: My name is Kevin.

[00:00:22] Emanuel: And we’re the Curious Pundits, and you’re listening to the Curious Pundits podcast, episode 12 already with a topic of “Why did the Internet became such a bad place?”. I must confess that I am the person who proposed this topic and most likely… this will substitute therapy… this episode substitute therapy for me and for everyone else that’s listening because I suspect I’m not the only person who thinks that the Internet is something different than we expect, and not for the good.

My name is Emanuel, we have Kevin, curiouspundits.com is the place where you can go in and subscribe and like and share and listen to previous episodes as well on YouTube, on Spotify, on Apple Podcast, on your favorite platform of choice.

That being said, Kevin, do you think the Internet has become a bad place or is it better than it used to be? I don’t know. This is a very general questions, but you know what I’m saying?

[00:01:25] Kevin: There are some ways in which it’s better and that it makes certain things possible or faster that used to either not be possible or take a lot of time, but in many ways many aspects of it are just awful these days.

Now, for what it’s worth, I’m old enough to remember when in order to get on the Internet, you needed to be comfortable with commands. There was no browser yet. So… I’ve been around for the entire development and evolution of what we call the Internet. And yeah, it used to be… in many ways it used to be much better.

[00:02:00] Emanuel: When I’m saying the Internet has become a bad place, I’m strictly referring to the user experience. A regular user, a person who is doing something on the Internet.

And to an extent it feels… weird to call it the Internet or do it online, since our lives are so immersed into this symbiosis of online and real IRL, in real life, that it doesn’t even make much sense to call it the Internet or online.

Nevertheless, we still need to do a lot of stuff with tools, with services, and they themselves have become a painful experience altogether. And I do have here a list of the things that bother me throughout the couple of months.

I said it’s therapy, right? And it’s cheaper… apparently, right? So… can’t afford therapy, start a podcast.

[00:02:57] Kevin: Right.

[00:02:58] Emanuel: I would start… because I’m also interested in your opinion. I would start simply to give the latest example, the one that I’ve experienced right now.

We’re using a platform called StreamYard to record this, which is an excellent platform and sometimes they have some offers that makes it really affordable and makes sense to purchase the premium package.

Nevertheless, each time I log in I’m bummed with notifications about product updates or some features that may or may not be of my interest, but sometimes it’s not just one, it’s two or three. And I know about everyone else but when I’m in the flow I want to go there and do something. Then whenever I get distracted by a pop-up or something like that, it messes up my workflow and it creates frustration.

So that’s the latest example that I’ve experienced just a couple of minutes before I join this session to record with Kevin. And sometimes it’s not just one but a couple of them. So you need to actually scroll through them and there’s no way of getting rid of them without reading.

We actually had a guest on my other show, How About Some Marketing that talked about the onboarding user experience, and he gave the comparison of going into a grocery store and having someone grab you by the arm and take you to the vegetables or to the fruits or to the dairy section and say, this is the newest ice cream, forced that experience.

Kevin, can you relate to this topic and what I just said?

[00:04:28] Kevin: I’ve had that same experience as well, although in my mind, the fact that you are required to notice things and dismiss them is one of the small annoyances on the Internet.

There are some annoyances, which in my mind are significantly larger…

[00:04:46] Emanuel: Like?

[00:04:47] Kevin: Well, I think one of the issues is that because we do so much online, it’s pretty easy to conflate or confuse an Internet issue with a customer service issue. So some of the companies we deal with, like Amazon, Walmart, we go online…

To a certain extent they’ve made some things easier, but to a certain extent they’ve made something…

[00:05:13] Emanuel: Take our money.

[00:05:14] Kevin: Annoying. That’s their objective, is…

[00:05:16] Emanuel: They make it really easy.

[00:05:17] Kevin: They want to take our money, but I think the fundamental issue there is that these companies are so big and so powerful.

What are you going to do? Not buy stuff on Amazon? There are some people who don’t, but sometimes… I want to buy something very specific and it’s literally not available locally. There is no store I can go to to buy it. So I have no choice but to go online.

And sometimes the process is just a pain in the ass.

And you can complain all you want to these large companies about how crappy their service is and they don’t care. What are you going to do? Leave? I have the same problem with various insurance companies and et cetera, et cetera.

[00:05:56] Emanuel: Spit it all out. Spit it all out Kevin, this is the time.

[00:06:00] Kevin: So I think part of the problem is that we’re required to do things online by these companies because it’s better for their bottom line.

And they just…

[00:06:10] Emanuel: Is it?

[00:06:10] Kevin: …don’t feel a certain compulsion to provide a high level of customer service because… they just don’t.

[00:06:17] Emanuel: I might argue with that.

I don’t think it’s in their best interest as well. I suspect because I work for some larger organizations and I know how things are, like politics and build things on top of things already existing. It doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve been there since the beginning. So sometimes it’s not even that, it’s the collecting data just for collecting data. So you add an extra layer so you can record a few more clicks showing engagement or whatever that be.

But it might be that things have just been added and … we always did it this way. It’s one of the most dangerous things as well. And to your point, Amazon, I think I mentioned this a few episodes ago, there was the system, the automatic cashier at a shoppers, which is not Target, but one of these stores, these bigger stores that sell everything essentially didn’t work.

So we have to actually wait in line to the cashier, not the self checkout, but to a person and cashier, and we were waiting in line and didn’t take cards, so we had to pay with cash. Now I only always carry a buck or with me, but most people didn’t have. But we actually stayed in line and it wasn’t something very special.

But it reminded me of the experience we actually had prior to that. Although I don’t really like the self-checkout as a concept, I must confess, it’ll be really difficult to go back to waiting in lines or dealing with the cashiers the way it used to. That’s one thing. Now coming back to Amazon, they released an AI assistant called Brutus I believe. A couple of months ago.

I’m experimenting with it and I’m trying to make use of it because the concept makes sense, but so far, and hopefully they will be doing some improvements, it’s useless so far.

So even when you’re on a product page and you ask some basic function, it gives you the PhD thesis of why that product is a good choice but doesn’t answer a simple question, does it come with battery or can this be used in Europe or North America, or is it good for children under three years or stuff like that.

So it’s getting there.

Amazon also has Prime, for example, and Amazon Prime, the video one. Do you watch movies and have you used Amazon Prime?

Their player?

[00:08:42] Kevin: No, I am not a Prime customer.

[00:08:44] Emanuel: Yeah. Their player is highly unintuitive, at all. So it creates basic frustrations. Just because you cannot click or something simple, that should be like a click of a play or a pause can become a frustration in itself. So it needs to be a balance, you cannot let the engineers have it their way, and you cannot not have engineers running any system either. So it needs to be a balance.

I’m going to come back to the list that I have here, because it can be pretty long, more or less. So I’m just going to go through them and feel free to jump right in anytime that you feel like doing so.

Also, I’m curious to know. Our subscribers or our listeners, what are your frustrations? What have you experienced? Just go to our website curiouspundits.com, and shoot us an email. I’m pretty sure you’ll find a way to contact us from the website.

I have here a bad experience is overall the UX and UI changes that makes no sense. Some of them are weird, some of them are idiotic workflows, and I’m going to give you an example from a hospital, I forgot which one, but they’ve introduced a system that’s kind of like self-checking as in triage, you just go in and do it yourself.

But the UI and overall the system is so complex or unintuitive that they actually had to hire a person, usually a student or somebody, a volunteer that goes in and helps you and do the things for you.

When I say weird idiotic workflows… is because, for example, I have my cell phone and my Internet on one bill because I use the same provider.

We only have two in Canada, so it’s pretty easy to figure out which one. I don’t want to give any names, but at one point last year they asked me to create a new account and then move the cell phone under a different kind of like product under the same billings account .

It took me 40 minutes because it’s a big company, so it’s unintuitive. I was speaking with support on chat. That’s another experience altogether. But I did this and now I have the same… just to get an email the other week to say… unify all of your accounts into a single one and pay a single bill.

That happened in the span of a couple of months to a year. Now, I don’t know about you or anyone else, but I would rather do something else with my 30 minutes than go in and submit those things. One thing I should…

[00:11:22] Kevin: Can I comment on that? Because…

[00:11:23] Emanuel: Yes.

[00:11:24] Kevin: I think what’s happening there is not so much that the Internet is the source of your annoyance. The Internet is the technology that enables it. So basically through the Internet, companies are pushing onto us, their customers, things that they used to do for us.

They’re trying to run their businesses with fewer people. There are fewer people to provide customer services, and they’re just pushing all kinds of weird frictions onto us that we would rather not do.

So is the Internet at fault? Well… kind of… the Internet is the enabling technology that allows that to happen.

[00:12:03] Emanuel: I just thought that it’s an attractive title, to be honest. It’s more attractive than something else. And what’s the substitute? You said they try to reduce the number of people. I would say also the people that they’re keeping are highly unprofessional to an extent.

I’m not afraid to use this word. They’re not professional. There’s one thing not to know your trade or your business that you’re in, which unfortunately, that’s true. And it’s not just once where I told the bank teller what they need to do and how they need to action, how to need to transfer this money here and so forth.

Because if I make a payment in Europe, if they don’t do it right, I can end up paying a couple of hundred dollars in commissions. So that’s one thing.

But also not having this basic human common sense and understand and communicate with the person, that’s another thing. I’m just going to leave things for now to the Internet, whatever that means.

And I probably should have started with saying that I’m a digital marketer. What does that mean? That by nature, I am using more tools than most people, right? At the end of the day, most people check either their email and a few software tools that they’re using at work, their CRM or their one or two things, whereas myself, a digital marketer can easily jump from StreamYard to CapCut, to edit some other videos, to edit the transcript of this and make some video edits as well, to YouTube, to social media, to WordPress.

I’m not going to mention WordPress and their updates and how it became… it was something good that it became something of a stress to me, to be honest.

[00:13:43] Kevin: In my mind, WordPress is a classic example of they’ve gotten big and powerful. I forget the exact percent, but apparently 30% or so of the Internet, I’ll have to look up the exact number… now runs on WordPress…

[00:13:56] Emanuel: I think more than that.

[00:13:57] Kevin: So we, the users of WordPress say, I want this. And they’re like okay, I’ll put that in the queue and then they never get to it.

[00:14:05] Emanuel: For those who don’t know, WordPress is a platform that allows you to build websites. With all it’s flaws, it’s still the one that you still have the most control as opposed to any other platform such as Wix or Squarespace or Webflow or Shopify that are a painful experience altogether.

This is actually a good thing that you brought this in because I often say that in 2002… I’m not that young either… I was able to do more things with the Front Page website builder from Microsoft, it used to be in the the office suite. They don’t have that anymore. I used to be able to do more things than I can do today in 2026, with sites like Wix or Squarespace and all those things, and even some basic functions like having a sub folder or a subpage essentially in URL, it’s not doable with some of these platforms even today, in 2026.

So that’s another frustration that the Internet has enabled, and people tend to take it for granted. Obviously since they don’t know, they don’t know. But I’m the person who knows and it doesn’t make any logical sense from the business perspective either. If you are a big business and you are doing… we’re going to implement this feature because it’s going to make us money, so we’re going to stop letting people do this because it’s going to make us more money, I can understand.

But all these examples I’m sharing here are not falling under that umbrella.

So that’s one of the things… UI and workflows. Another thing… I had for example… Zoom. Zoom is a platform for online meetings that became extremely popular during the COVID pandemic. There’s other platforms as well, but Zoom have kind of like make it easy.

Nevertheless, I feel frustrated whenever I join a meeting and I’ve noticed that I’m not the only one that has even after five years of using it almost daily. I know people that you know have a premium account and they host meetings and they host masterminds and podcasts and all those things.

It’s still very unintuitive where things are, where people should press a button, where they should find a certain features and so forth. You can’t even change your name before you join a meeting if you are already logged in. And I was saying something as simple as raising the hand, sharing the screen or creating a poll or trust or the admin to someone else hasn’t become natural to people that I know because I’ve seen them. I’ve been in those meetings for five years now and they’ve been the admin and they still… some people still ask me, somehow I’m the tech guy, I don’t know how I ended up, but people still ask me… the same people that I’ve seen them… how do I do this? How do I do that?

I don’t think that’s a user problem. I think that’s a tool problem because your users weren’t able to understand your tool after so many years.

Thoughts on that, Kevin?

[00:17:12] Kevin: It’s actually hard, as you know based on my platform, and I’m going to do a five second commercial, it’s OrganicGrowth.biz. It’s a link exchange platform.

It’s hard to design an intuitive user interface. I am struggling with it. By the way, I’m in the midst of a major redesign, and it’s going to roll out in a couple of weeks. Well that probably means a couple months. Everything takes longer than you initially think. But it’s a challenge to make a user interface user experience that is intuitive. It’s really hard.

[00:17:44] Emanuel: It’s also a sweet spot of getting the feedback from user, but also keeping it, sticking to best practices. Through the standards, because there are some standards there.

And…

[00:17:58] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:17:58] Emanuel: Whenever I go, I expect some stuff. Whenever I go to a website, I expect to see a main navigation, for example, to see a contact page. I have clients that told me, oh no, remove the contact page from the navigation. It’s hard to argue with that. It’s like saying remove the telephone number from my office so that nobody can call me.

To an extent…

[00:18:21] Kevin: Believe it or not, there are sometimes legitimate business reasons for doing this. So the first time I personally encountered this was a web developer who had given a presentation at WordCamp, which is the big WordPress… they have them in cities all over the world…

[00:18:36] Emanuel: Yeah, I’ve been.

[00:18:36] Kevin: The big annual WordPress show… and she was talking about how she had a guy who was a very large real estate developer, and by large I meant he didn’t build houses, he built subdivisions of houses. He came to her and basically said, I need a website. And she did the standard template and he did exactly what you said. He is like… take off the address, take off the phone number, take off the contact us page.

She’s like… please explain to me why that makes sense to you. And he says I don’t want any random strangers just contacting me. In my business model we don’t work with anybody we don’t already know. I just need an electronic brochure.

[00:19:18] Emanuel: That’s the very good description.

And that’s something that I can understand and probably I can do, but I’m not doing that, and it’s not a recommendation.

Where were we… with the contact removing an expectation and the best practices as well.

Another note I had here about Bluetooth headphones, for example. I don’t know about you, but I’m using a wired headphones and these are like 30 something bucks and they’ve been amazing. I had them for a couple years.

I don’t know why people are still pushing it because it’s a terrible experience. First of all, you need to… not even the Apple headphones, maybe I had a bad experience with mine. There’s always a dissing. Either the left or the right doesn’t sync, or it’s not charged, or any other stuff.

Not to mention what I said here that some of them have some incompatibility issues, I suspect. So that if I watch something and then I hit pause, it’s turning off. Then turning back on whenever I move the mouse and then turning back off and so forth. I don’t know if everybody experienced that, I did. And it’s becoming a frustration as well because you just stop for a second to do your thing and you still brutal off or headphones off or stuff like that.

This is terrible, terrible experience. And to mention also that I would tell these companies to choose the voices that you’re using wisely because I had a pair of headphones, cheaper, arguably cheaper of course, because they used to run and for jogging. And sometimes it’s not fun when your 300 bucks ear bud jumps all over your ear, and you need to search for it. So I got some that I use for jogging. I used, I’m not in shape anymore. You couldn’t tell if the voice, I suspect lady was saying, on or off or connected or unconnected. So that’s one thing that I would recommend these.

[00:21:23] Kevin: I’d like to argue that that’s not an Internet thing per se.

That’s a technology feature. That goes back to my idea of these companies don’t really feel compelled to listen to us. Now some do, but some of the larger manufacturers, they just release a product and it works or it doesn’t, and yeah.

[00:21:42] Emanuel: Probably there should be a manifesto. Putting it somewhere to stick to some standards and not just let anyone do their thing, have different names for the same things and stuff like that.

What I wanted to say, coming back to your point about user experience and implementing a intuitive dashboard for a software, it’s a sweet spot between keeping with the best practices, giving them what you want them to give, and also giving them what they ask for. There’s a saying in web design, if you ask the users what they want, you’ll end up with another porn site.

[00:22:19] Kevin: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:20] Emanuel: So again, it needs to be an equally brilliant. Overlapping in Tooltips, that’s one of my biggest frustrations right now. And I have two examples, Grammarly and ClickUp and the Link Previews as well.

I don’t know, maybe I’m also old enough and I got too accustomed to the way of things were as in your drop link and you just see the URL.

It doesn’t transform in embed, or a preview with a follow and the title. Nothing happens when you hover with a mouse over it. If you send an email, then you have Grammarly, which is a tool that directly helps you and corrects the typos and the syntax errors that you are making. I’m not a native English speaker and also typos are my thing, so it helps a lot, but sometimes it became the frustration because it doesn’t allow you to see some of the things that you’re writing.

Or a password manager that covers with their icon, the entire password section where you need to type in and you can’t see.

Stuff like that. So these things are extremely extremely frustrating for me. And I’m pretty sure that for everyone else it’s just that probably I’m using more.

For example, I had here zoom menu dropdown.

Xoom is owned by PayPal for making online payments as well, and it’s almost like you’re clicking and sending it to the wrong person easily because of the UX and UI.

[00:23:50] Kevin: Yeah, it is easy. I use Zelle on occasion. I log into my bank website and I use Zelle and I just go really slow to make sure that I’m sending whatever I’m sending to the right person, because it’s easy to screw it up.

[00:24:04] Emanuel: In CSS, it’s… in a web design, it’s called cumulative layouts…

[00:24:08] Kevin: Cascading style sheets, yeah.

[00:24:09] Emanuel: And it’s one of the things that theoretically Google penalizes a website against. And whenever you want to click something and another popup happens and you say you want to click yes and then something else pops up and you end up clicking no.

[00:24:22] Kevin: Yep, I’ve done that.

[00:24:25] Emanuel: Tends to happen. And obviously if you’re sending money and I’ve sent money… because the UX UI is not intuitive. I sent it to the right person, but the password I chose, it was automatically checked to use the same password as last time.

So stuff like that, that can create frustrations.

And again, most people don’t interact with as many things as I do because I can, in a span of an hour, I can easily go through all of these things that I’ve complained with. I can go to ClickUp, Xoom, send a payment, create a StreamYard recording, send an email where I use Grammarly, turn in my Bluetooth headphones to listen to a mix or some product within a span of couple of minutes. I’m experiencing more and more.

One of the things that I’m against though is forcing people to use some software and tools and where I’m going with this is utility bills that can be paid only through apps on phone. For example, my mom is older, although she’s more flexible, she knows better how to pay her bills from the cell phone because she learn, because she had to, than my cell for example.

You cannot do this to people in their seventies or eighties. Even here in Canada there’s people who don’t have a cell phone, but they’re forced to have one to pay some of their utility bills or do some other stuff that are only done through an app. Remember COVID? Remember traveling.

Remember? Have you traveled internationally during COVID?

[00:26:09] Kevin: No.

[00:26:10] Emanuel: I can tell you because I went to a couple of places and each country had their own app. You first of all need to download the app, you cannot do it through the website, which is not fun because I’m not a cybersecurity expert, but I don’t like to install apps on my phone unless I know I have to.

And of course, from trusted sources as well. I’m fine, I made peace with myself that Facebook, Meta, Google, Alphabet and a couple of those guys will know everything that I do, and no, I’m hoping they’ll know even better than I what I need than when I need it. But I…

[00:26:51] Kevin: That’s not necessarily a good thing.

[00:26:54] Emanuel: I made peace with that.

That’s the reality that we live in. So I understand that it’s Amazon, Alphabet and Meta will have that, but I cannot give it to just anyone. And they were forcing me to download an app, to fill out some information, personal information, and not being intuitive so you had to click something, then go back to something else to fill out more information.

Because you couldn’t feel it at the beginning, you had to go a few steps further and then come back, and there are, there were apps like that. So coming back to the main thing, you cannot force some people that are already targets for scams and other malicious activities to use some apps that aren’t even that intuitive and that safe in the first place themselves.

And that’s a problem. And this is something that I would have a fight over for sure.

[00:27:50] Kevin: The Internet has definitely facilitated people scamming other people out of money and for whatever reason, in the last month, I’ve gotten a lot more phishing emails than I’ve ever gotten before.

Like I used to get zero and now I get one or two a week for the past month. So this is just a piece of advice to everybody, if you get an email from Starbucks or whatever, first look at the From email address and make sure that it’s from a “@starbucks.com” domain. Then hover over what they’re asking you to click on.

And in the bottom left of… well it may vary from browser to browser, but on the bottom left of Chrome you can see the URL that it goes to. So…

[00:28:31] Emanuel: Don’t click.

[00:28:31] Kevin: Those two things…

[00:28:32] Emanuel: Don’t click.

[00:28:32] Kevin: … before you do anything else…

[00:28:34] Emanuel: Don’t click.

[00:28:34] Kevin: … and if it looks sketchy, just delete it.

[00:28:36] Emanuel: Don’t click. That’s important.

[00:28:38] Kevin: Don’t click. Yeah.

[00:28:39] Emanuel: So hover over and there’s a website that I use, a URL scan or something that where you can put in URL that before you click, there’s a way to save it without clicking and they’ll tell you if it’s safe or not. And even if the email can look legitimate, it can come from Starbucks and that gives you a gift card and still be a scam. We’re not cyber security experts. Full disclosure, we’re just two random people that know a thing or two about it, and we’re sharing our experience and it is becoming more…

I wanted to say, Kevin, that you’re be getting more phishing emails because you’re become more popular because our podcast is growing and that’s one of the trade offs that you have to give when you are becoming such a huge star. So expect more, take it huge as a positive sign…

[00:29:20] Kevin: Maybe one day. I want to actually segue into what to me is a much bigger issue.

Yeah, there’s all these little annoyances with user experiences and user interfaces that in aggregate just irritate the hell out of us. But on a larger scale the issues of the Internet making things more difficult… there’s a certain design behind all of it, and in my mind, there’s really two big reasons why this is happening.

One is the concentration of market power on the part of service providers and the other is… primarily as a result of the Internet, but what I’m about to talk about actually predates the Internet. In fact, it’s probably about maybe a hundred years old now. We are turning attention into a commodity that is bought and sold.

Like this is the whole basis of advertising.

[00:30:18] Emanuel: You are talking like it’s about to happen. No, it has happened. So we have turned. It’s not we are…

[00:30:25] Kevin: Oh yeah.

[00:30:26] Emanuel: It happened already.

[00:30:27] Kevin: We have in a big way, right? So because attention is now a commodity, which is bought and sold, there’s a whole bunch of people out there trying to get our attention so that they can sell it, right?

And how do they get our attention? They polarize us. They say things…

[00:30:46] Emanuel: One of the biggest…

[00:30:46] Kevin: That are just outrageous, clickbait headlines and ridiculous opinions and extremists, this that and the other. And… it works.

[00:30:55] Emanuel: I fall for them all the time.

[00:30:58] Kevin: We all do. It’s just human psychology.

[00:31:01] Emanuel: Probably a topic for another conversation, so I don’t want to go into that rabbit hole.

Again. I still believe that…

[00:31:07] Kevin: But to me, those are the big reasons. All of the little annoying stuff that corporations are doing in an effort to save a buck here and save a buck there, or because it’s very poorly designed, and I know I made mention of this in a previous episode, but some of the problems stem from the fact that the people who developed the technology… are of a certain demographic. So like how automatic soap dispensers don’t work if you have really dark skin, and how self-driving cars don’t see people who have really dark skin at night, et cetera, et cetera. That’s just a result of the engineering team was either all white or all spoke with non southern accents or some…

[00:31:49] Emanuel: Yeah.

[00:31:49] Kevin: … characteristic. And when they finally rolled it out to a different group of people, it didn’t work right because it had never been tested with people who fit those characteristics. Either had a certain accent or a certain skin color or whatever. And that’s a part of the problem as well.

[00:32:06] Emanuel: There’s a joke that was going on during the communist period saying that in a factory, why, all the engineers never take off at the same time.

They always go on vacation separately. Not all of them go because everybody soon will realize that the factory will run just perfectly fine without them. So I suspect that… that’s why I was saying equilibrium.

Obviously all the systems are important to have an engineer. It cannot function without it, but you cannot let him run that. It needs to be a mix. I’m going to embarrass myself. So for me, it’s about the experience. I cannot know something else I experienced, you’ll tell me don’t touch that because you’ll burn yourself. The first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to touch it obviously through that’s an extreme example. But I think that there’s a mix and we should consider more things before going live with something.

Two things I had here on my list that I want to… actually three that I want to mention for this podcast, because we’re already a couple of good minutes in.

First of all, have you been playing Captcha a lot recently?

[00:33:12] Kevin: Playing what?

[00:33:13] Emanuel: Captcha, proving you’re human.

[00:33:15] Kevin: Oh. Less and less because more and more websites do the checkbox thing.

[00:33:19] Emanuel: Of course yeah, but have you been doing that more than you used to before proving that you’re human? Even when you go to something, you have the CloudFlare, all of the big websites, CloudFlare, Captcha system, or even Google at one point, used to ask you to play Captcha.

That’s the word I’m using, right? To play to find the correct…

[00:33:40] Kevin: It’s the right word, and the answer is kind of yes and kind of no. The kind of yes part is I am being asked more and more to prove that I’m human. But the no part is they’re using the Captcha where all you do is click the checkbox rather than have to identify the pictures.

So I’m getting a lot more check boxes that I have to click, but I much prefer that to the pictures.

[00:34:02] Emanuel: I get all of them. Again, I’m moving from one to another.

[00:34:05] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:34:05] Emanuel: Because sometimes I use VPN, sometimes I use different browsers, Brave and all those things. Plus I’m in Canada, so I suspect that any website from US is seen as a threat and they give me more of that.

But even when you click from a Google search or you go to page two, they’ll ask you to fill out a Captcha puzzle or something like that, which is fairly frustrating as well.

Two things now. So how hard it is for companies to date and name the invoice properly because they give a random name that makes no sense.

And if you have a company or you have a couple of subscriptions, let’s say you have ChatGPT, StreamYard, Descript, CapCut, Google Workspace, whatever. How hard it is for them to actually name them. And when you save them to have them filed properly because I do that.

Maybe I’m going too much in the extreme, but at the end of the day, I think that’s beneficial from a bookkeeping standpoint, from me as a business owner to have a solid view of my numbers, and inevitably you’ll find some discrepancies. For example, it’s year end right now we’re preparing to submit the taxes for last year and you review stuff and there’s always something that you need to go back or double check or all those things.

And it helps if it says Google invoice or Facebook invoice then…

[00:35:23] Kevin: Or whatever. I completely agree.

[00:35:25] Emanuel: Three five hashtag whatever.

[00:35:27] Kevin: In my case, it’s not so much invoices as lines relative to a purchase via a credit card or a debit card. Like sometimes I’m like, what is this? And I have to go back and it’s not necessarily big dollar amounts.

What did I spend $17 and 5 cents for on the 13th of last month? Because, I don’t know, it was like it was a while ago. And it has taken me a while sometimes to figure it out.

[00:35:51] Emanuel: And you have… you see a name there… bella Technologies Incorporated whatever. And you see 17 bucks or whatever, and you remember you bought a charm or something like that, right?

[00:36:01] Kevin: Yeah. I needed some like weird bolts that I couldn’t find locally. So I bought them from a place, but the description… in nowhere does the description include the word bolt.

[00:36:10] Emanuel: So again, standards are important.

[00:36:14] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:36:14] Emanuel: They force us to use the standards in some places, but not in others.

[00:36:19] Kevin: Yep.

[00:36:19] Emanuel: I definitely will propose to have some basic standards and…

[00:36:25] Kevin: I would actually like to propose basic standards for social media. Now I’m going to compare email to social media.

The email specifications were developed way back in the… mid to late 1970s I guess.

I’m not sure when the first email was sent, but imagine if, in order to send someone an email, they needed to be on the same email platform as you.

You had to be on Apple together, you had to be on Google together, you had to be on a AOL together. In order to communicate with people, you would have to have a whole bunch of different email accounts and a whole bunch of different systems, and that was resolved by having a standard way…

[00:37:05] Emanuel: Protocol, yeah.

[00:37:06] Kevin: Of formatting and exchanging email messages so we don’t have to deal with that.

In social media, we have to deal with that. One of the reasons that people stay with Facebook and or Twitter slash X or whatever, and don’t just abandon them and go to Mastodon or Bluesky or whatever it is the people that they want to communicate with…

[00:37:27] Emanuel: I see that.

[00:37:27] Kevin: Are on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, and it’s not so easy to leave. So I would love social media standards in the same way that we have email standards, same concept, and then anybody could create a better social media platform that people could try out, experiment with, and they’d still be plugged into the global thing without being locked off in these like technological islands, which just annoy the hell out of me.

[00:37:58] Emanuel: This is what the agentic web, whatever that will mean, will try to solve as well. Having protocols of communication between different platforms through that. So you can easily talk to Facebook from X or from some other.

In that context, we need to remember that in many other countries there’s different platforms of communication that… people don’t use Facebook in Asia, for example, as much as…

[00:38:23] Kevin: Right.

[00:38:23] Emanuel: WeChat or some others. And to that extent, I wanted to say that many people, especially in North America, don’t know that iPhone is not the only cell phone there is.

I use an Android for example. But people in North America, in US and in Canada, don’t know Android, I mean what’s that? Isn’t it like an iPhone? They don’t even know that there’s actually something else, some other platforms. And to that extent, again, these companies can do a little bit better with their apps.

And whatever they asking people to, letting people put in there, because I was reading a statistic saying that… one of the most downloaded apps in certain areas is the flashlight. Because people don’t know that most phones have a native flashlight option…

[00:39:09] Kevin: Right

[00:39:10] Emanuel: … on your cell phone, and they actually go in and install an app for that.

And you could guess that those apps have malware, are a security issue for the system itself.

A topic that we can revisit at another time. And I’m going to end up with. One of the biggest frustrations that I have right now in 2026… how hard it is to play music?

On the Internet you can go to YouTube or Spotify and listen there, but what if I don’t want to do that? How about I have some old MP3s because apparently a couple years ago, everybody was pushing you to buy the MP3s. 15 years ago, all the music were sold through SMS text message. You would buy MP3s through text message and stuff like that.

What happened to that and how can I listen to them? Back in my day, we used to have this thing called Winamp. It was pretty straightforward. We launched the program. You drag the folder. And you play the music. Right now it’s a painful process and I don’t even know what options there are. It used to be iTunes, fairly easy, but right now with… I think it’s called Music, I’m on a Mac, you need to create place, list, import there, or do all of these unnecessary things in order to listen to a song that you would… and by no means I love YouTube, I love Spotify, because I have access to music that otherwise I won’t want to discover. And I like to listen to a lot of music, but if I want to play music on my computer. How do you do it?

[00:40:34] Kevin: Pandora…

[00:40:34] Emanuel: In 2026.

[00:40:35] Kevin: … Spotify. This is yet another example of corporate interests trying to take advantage of what I’m calling or what other people call the attention economy .

They would rather sell commercials to people who want to bring them to us than sell us music one time. It used to be you bought an album, you bought a CD, you owned it, you played it when you want it. And there were no commercials involved. They want to sell commercials. So they’re structuring…

[00:41:07] Emanuel: I understand that.

[00:41:08] Kevin: … the delivery of music around “How do we sell commercials?”.

[00:41:13] Emanuel: But there’s also a counterpart whenever they did this. There was also another option and it feels like all the other options are not there anymore. For operating system, you had Linux and at one point they released a bundle which was more user friendly and you could do some stuff with it. But it feels like you don’t have the options for if, I’m pretty sure there are options there.

And thank God with the help of AI, actually we can build some solutions ourselves. I’m actually building a project management tool, proprietary because I’m too frustrated with all the updates and with all the unnecessary things that my current project management tool is having right now. It became as WordPress it became a good solution that has grown into a bigger place.

It became too big and has too much bloat that is become fairly unusable. And if anybody has gone into a workplace dashboard, I know from 10 years ago some solid workplace developers that had issues with the dashboards, with all the updates, with all the unnecessary things, and even plugins, right? And software updates.

You cannot allow people to make an update just because they had a comma or an extra space in the description, and they want to remove that. It should be some standards. Or at least come at the cost, and not of my time. Because the last thing I want to do is just interrupt my workflow and all the million tabs because I’m not sure about you, but I have a million tabs open on all the browsers…

[00:42:44] Kevin: Yeah, I do too.

[00:42:45] Emanuel: Get interrupted because they need to do a website update.

But that being said, I already feel better. Whew.

Having the podcast helps, used to be the blog where I spilled all my frustrations. Now it’s the podcast. Anything else to add, Kevin?

[00:43:02] Kevin: I want to draw people’s attention to, and I’ll put a link to it in the show notes.

There’s a consumer advocacy group in Norway. I don’t think it’s part of the government. I think it’s a separate entity, who’s trying to address the issue and they have this hilarious commercial to make the point.

To very briefly summarize the commercial. A guy is talking into the camera and he says that his job is to make things shitty, and he’s a third generation, make things shitty.

His father did this, his grandfather did this. Then they show scenes of a family is around the dinner table and he’s sawing a little bit off of one of the legs to make sure that the table wobbles and then he leaves, right? And then he says, and then my job became so much easier when they released or developed the Internet. Now I can make things shitty at such scale it’s unreal.

And the whole focus of the commercial is to draw attention to the fact that some of the things that are, shall we say, making the Internet shitty are not accidental, like they’re being done on purpose.

[00:44:13] Emanuel: Looking forward to seeing that commercial.

Until then, thank you for listening. My name is Emanuel.

[00:44:19] Kevin: My name is Kevin.

[00:44:20] Emanuel: Curiouspundits.com. Until the next episode, signing off.

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