From the Editor’s Desk: Bad Advice (Premium)

Like many of you, I use a read-later service to put aside articles, blog posts, and other web pages so I can reference them later. I'm currently using Instapaper after several years with Pocket, but there's nothing wrong with the latter per se. It's just that I use so many different PCs and devices that constantly having to re-sign in using a Mozilla account and its weird requirements is so tedious. Regardless of the service, I use this sort of thing for all kinds of reasons, both personal and work-related. I will often use it to read longer articles that are of interest to me in a distraction-free way, of course. But it's also handy for news or other in-the-moment information that I need for my writing.

As part of a series of experiments related to local accounts and seeing whether particular Windows 11 configurations would or would not alleviate some enshittification, especially that related to OneDrive Folder backup and Microsoft Office harassment, I opened Widgets and saw a headline that seemed curiously familiar and yet was only recently published. So I clicked on it, like an idiot, and it opened the article in Microsoft Edge, because of the aforementioned enshittification we all deal with in Windows 11. So I saved it to Instapaper and closed Edge as quickly as possible.

And then I forgot about it. This has been a busy month, and yesterday was a busy day, as Wednesdays always are, thanks to Windows Weekly carving three hours right out of the middle of it (or more, if you add in the time it takes to write the show notes). But Thursday is a new day. And this morning, I got up at 7 am, giving me about 45 minutes before I had to be on-camera for First Ring Daily, and so I drank some coffee and read the news. This isn't always the case, but it went quickly this morning, and so I opened Instapaper after I finished with the news apps I start each day with.

And then I saw the article I had saved. Yes. This was familiar. Seeing the headline again--"I asked a pro photographer for the best iPhone camera settings — my pics are now better than yours," which is absolutely terrible--I thought back, and I figured I had come across it as long as months ago. And I had this vague memory that the advice it offered wasn't just bad, but dangerously and stupidly bad. I was curious. So I clicked it. Or tapped it, I guess, this was on my iPad. And this is what I saw.

In case it's not clear, there's nothing to read. In the multi-tiered hell that is the modern Internet, this web article was originally published on some website, it was picked up by Microsoft's network of terrible news sources and regurgitated in a new format on its various feeds (MSN on the web, formerly Start, and the Discover feed in Widgets), and then it was further extruded into Instapaper, by me, where all the content was lost.

This happens sometimes. So Instapaper offers an option to read the original article. Which you can find here.

Here, I learned a few...