web browsing and counter-intuitive strategies

counter-intuitive strategies are a pretty powerful concept. sometimes situations demand doing the exact oppposite of what would otherwise appear to be an insane option.

heres a case study with web browsing. suppose you wanted ad-free and popup-free browsing, but still want the infotainment you want from the web. the intuitive option is to confine yourself to a whitelist of safe websites that do not have aggressive and annoying ad-strategies. well, it turns out the way web economics works is not entirely amenable to this strategy. most websites make their revenues primarily off of ads and thus its suboptimal for you as a consumer to wait for nice websites to offer content of your choice (google is an exception..)

now.. suppose you had an option like Firefox's Adblock plugin. the intuitive option is to go browse the websites of your choice and then block annoying content from these. now turns out that websites and ad-strategies evolve, so your coverage over ads is often incomplete. the counter-intuitive option is to spend some time on absolutely annoying websites which have a lot of ads. of course you may not be interested in the content of the websites, what you are really interested is in the gamut of ads and adversarial strategies that are out there. this grants you much more efficient and much quicker coverage over the space of ad-strategies employed out there. chances are if you visit one of these annoying sites, they ae likely employ a much greater diversity of tools, ad-referrers, banners etc.

gist of the whole rant: to get faster coverage over a blacklist, visit arbit websites aggresssively :-)