Tynt is the Armpit of the Internet

I’m going to war against Tynt. They’re the [REDACTED] who came up with that bit of Javascript to add custom text into your computer’s clipboard without your permission. So when I copy text from, say, RealClearPolitics, I don’t just get the text I copied. Instead, RCP “helpfully” added this to the bottom of the stuff I actually wanted from Michael Barone’s piece yesterday:

Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/04/22/at_every_turn_things_were_spinning_out_of_control_118057.html#ixzz2RDoOFBWo
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter
Because we’re douchebags

I might have added a tiny bit of my own text to the crap Tynt bottom-loaded into my clipboard. Maybe.

But you see what I mean. If you’re adding RCP stuff to your blog, or even just to an email or a Facebook post to a friend, they’re going to insert text which, if you don’t delete it, will make you look like a ham-fisted SEO douche. But I repeat myself.

Now, leave it to the nags at Financial Times to make a bad thing even worse. They’re using Tynt to add text to the top of what you copy. In this morning’s story about the revised GDP, I almost let this slip through:

We’re the world’s biggest douchebags here at FT, and we hope we’ve thoroughly alienated you, the bloggers who help direct traffic our way.

FT was extra sneaky, because I’d never seen Tynt add anything to the top of what I’d copied, and it almost slipped through. And again, I might have made my own small changes to the stuff FT forced into my clipboard. Because two can play that game. Besides, they’re hacking our computers in a small way, installing things we didn’t approve of or ask for. They deserve to be treated with the same disdain with which they treat us.

Look. There’s no such thing as a perfect website, and we’re all trying to increase our pageviews and our revenues. But Tynt is just wrong. It takes something we’ve all been doing on our computers for almost as long as we’ve been using computers, and it ruins it. By adding nag messages. Which then get deleted before they actually serve their intended purpose.

To make things worse, Tynt seems to have found a way to get around the Tynt-blocker I have installed in Chrome and Safari, so now I have to use site-wide JavaScript blockers instead. That means sites like FT and RCP lose lots of their nifty features, unless I bother to temporarily switch JavaScript back on — which believe me is not generally worth the time.

There’s an unwritten blogger’s code: You quote your source, you link your source, and you send readers to your source by not quoting all their material. We get to borrow material, they get publicity and traffic. Everybody wins, so long as bloggers treat their sources with respect — and vice-effing-versa.

But nobody wins when you treat the people who send you traffic like thieves, or make them look like idiots to their readers.

I’m tired of being treated like a thief. So from now on, I’m going to replace Tynt text with my own. And I plan on getting real creative with it.

To my fellow bloggers, I ask only this: Link to this post if you like, but please join me in my crusade and replace Tynt’s text with your own. Left, right, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Muslim, or Jew, there’s one thing we can agree on:

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take Tynt anymore!”