On behalf of all the old school internet marketers and online business owners ready to jump ship and throw in the towel, I’d like to say a few words.
The internet is broken, if you haven’t already figured that out.
If you’re not ready for a litany of complaints, do not read this. But I’m going to be dead honest.
The technology tools that we used successfully just five years ago to automate orders on our websites and create passive income online have become utterly FUBAR.
For those who don’t know, Fubar stands for F!ked Up Beyond All Repair.
Where to start?
Email Marketing: Abysmally Broken
Customers and prospects are not receiving emails. I sell digital products. Emails should reach my customers without complication. Because the emails are not hitting the inbox after the customer pays, the customers are becoming irate and heading to PayPal to complain.
A PayPal complaint that is not resolved using lengthy explanations and screenshots of the customer account and purchase, will count as a strike against them and could get their account banned.
Do you know how long it takes to resolve an issue on PayPal if you manage to break through and speak to someone on the phone? It’s a good portion of your waking hours in a single day. Imagine a whole day just trying to get one order resolved for $27 that someone submitted a complaint about?
Email deliverability has become complicated beyond belief. A website owner should not have to dig into the guts of their domain settings and add text records and MX records just to get emails to hit the inbox while already paying monthly fees to the email marketing services as it is.
First we pay about $20 a month just to send out marketing emails and manage lists of customers. Then we pay another $35 per month for an extra email deliverability feature.
Then the program that we signed up for does not function correctly. You try to reset your password or login and you end up in some type of online purgatory no-man’s land. The place where emails and your faith in humanity go to die.
So you drift away to do something else, and 3 days goes by while you’re dealing with life and its various complexities.
Customers who signed up using Gmail do not receive emails because Gmail has apparently very high spam parameters now. And yet as a Gmail user myself, I have unsubscribed to emails from our local library numerous times but somehow they still keep on showing up in my inbox.
Payment Options Dicey as Hell
Services that an online business owner would sign up for to help their business run more smoothly and seamlessly often no longer include a PayPal option to sign up. Companies more commonly ask for a credit card, and some of us do not have an online business card. This has been devastating.
Then there’s Venmo, a super useful payment app that behaves like a virus and swipes contacts right from your email acting like that’s normal. Na, bro. That’s what viruses do. Venmo is a virus. Stop asking me to Venmo you.
And Klarna, the ultimate “I’ll pay you on Tuesday for a hamburger today” payment procrastinator app that asks for your bank account number so they can help themselves to some interest payments while they drag out the time it takes you to pay for whatever you’re buying.
In a bad economy, why not? Make it slow and painful. Everyone gets to act like the big credit card companies.
PayPal… From Bad to Worse
Let’s talk more about PayPal. For some reason the company refuses to set up their website in a logical format that would facilitate simple budget balancing for the small business owner.
Trying to navigate the inside of the PayPal site is nearly impossible. The words that they use to name the functions PayPal offers don’t make any sense and are often redundant.
PayPal should display a two-column layout that features payables on one side and receivables on the other. All information should present in a thread-like format so we can find what we need in one specific area of our business financials.
Buttons and links on PayPal are currently labeled as things like Reports, Sales, Financials.
Don’t quote me on this. The names of the functions PayPal uses change regularly, so by the time you read this it could say something entirely different. But the point is, the words they use all could essentially mean the same thing, therefore they’re confusing and redundant.
Facebook. A Cesspool of Fake Content and Fake Engagement
Social media is now pay to play. On Facebook, if you send them credit card payments they will kick some fake leads your way to bloat your following and make it look like you have a lot of potential business sitting there, or to make it look like your channel is getting a lot of attention and engagement.
After you pay your way in to your fake following, the platform might start showing your posts to actual humans who have profiles. But if you don’t pay, you’ll typically only get creepers and scammers coming over to thumbs-up your stuff.
It goes without saying that all the problems we now encounter trying to make online technology function correctly have caused our online income to plummet severely.
Do I have to even bring up AI and what it’s done to the internet? AI is killing organic search because no one can be bothered to read past the summaries.
But if you actually read the summaries, which I do, you’ll see how pitifully inaccurate they are because it’s basically a function that plucks content from different websites without actually vetting the information from those websites, and puts it at the top.
All of this happens at a much more accelerated pace than prior generations of internet. I mean, it’s hyperspeed. So not only do you have quick information, but it’s wrong information. That makes AI research inaccurate, unreliable, and frankly dangerous.
Chat GPT: Your Codependent Robot Buddy That’s Destroying All Your Relationships
I don’t even have the energy to unpack this one. Tell everything to the computer instead of to your real life family and friends who love you. See what happens in 10 years.
YouTube Not Good Either
YouTube is my favorite platform, or at least it was until fake video content went viral. It seems like less than a year ago I was happy making video content on YouTube knowing that actual intelligent life forms might be consuming what I had shared.
But once Trump took presidency, YouTube’s video content went out of control and it’s clear that nefarious and unscrupulous individuals and companies are just trying to make quick cash by throwing up sensational content that is completely fake, fabricated. With AI tools so accessible again, this is unbelievably dangerous.
Over the summer I got caught up in a web of deception on YouTube after coming across painfully fake videos circulating that covered supposed details of the Diddy trial.
The content was outrageous, inflammatory, and libelous… but it was so well done that I could see where a lot of people fell for it.
I have dipped my foot in the water of potentially making content on YouTube and getting paid for that. But honestly, it’s just too scary. Do we really know what these websites are doing with the data on our faces, voices etc? Should we be bothered that they have all of this identifying information on us? I for one am.
User protection and privacy lacking on YouTube
You use the platform to create video content hoping to make money. So you make the content public. But then you get some undesirable users.
Do you know how impossible it is to block a YouTube user from viewing your videos? This is a massive safety issue. If someone is bothering me, either on purpose or maybe just in a general way because they’re a creep or whatever, the content creator should be able to block said viewer as a means of basic protection and for privacy reasons.
Additionally, when we try to explain what has been going on with our businesses, why success rates have dropped so severely, we just look stupid, and no one is listening anyway.
I can’t take the fakeness
Why am I honest about these things? Why the transparency? Because if something is broken it should be fixed, and everything is broken right now.
EVERY SINGLE THING you try to use on the internet doesn’t work.
How long is it going to take human civilization to realize that AI will mentally, financially and spiritually ruin us all?
Look at all of us desperados clamoring for paid work. We’re talking about professionals that have decades upon decades of real-world experience in marketing, technology, creative, content writing, and many other fields.
Meanwhile, applicant tracking software just keeps scanning our resumes and chucking them in the trash bin.
Then you have these robot-like human beings trained to spew canned gibberish and call that effective management, while their employees suffer in intolerable work conditions.
Keep taking those pharmaceuticals and put your head back in the sand. It’s easier to fire people when you have no emotions, no highs and lows, just that creepy, bot-like blunt affect.
Oh yes, I said that.
The state of affairs right now is absolutely mind boggling.
When is someone going to fix the internet?
When are they going to put logical people back in charge of how things work?
Google Adsense: No Signs of Life
Every time I attempt to make a website and add some Google AdSense to it, the automated Google AdSense creature comes back at me and tells me there’s something wrong with my content, but they won’t say what.
The content is undefinably low quality. But last time I checked, I enjoy sharing useful, well-researched information, and I’m a pretty darn skilled writer.
And because no human beings are policing Google’s programs, I’m left in the dark to try and figure out what the problem is if I even can bear to take more time away from myself to do so. Which is no.
So I’m basically ignoring my Google AdSense and the websites I created with the intention of building some passive income streams.
Wow, Google, thank you. That is so unbelievably helpful. Guess I will just abandon another website.