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LA Times and ads

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Re: LA Times and ads

#91

Post by zkms »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #47
zkms wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst type of ad on newspaper sites are the disgusting "chumboxes" (by scumsuckers like "taboola" or "outbrain") that orbit at the bottom of pages and serve up images meant to be as simultaneously repulsive and fascinating as possible: https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b... As long as these pages have ads that display utterly gross images (if you doubt me, click the above link) that make…

You must be in an NSFW ad bubble. I only see tame clickbait from the Taboola links.

> You must be in an NSFW ad bubble.

No, i get the trypophobia-triggering (DON'T GOOGLE THAT WORD) chumbox images when browsing in incognito mode, without pre-existing cookies or anything else. This has nothing to do with my ad bubble, https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b... has mentioned that the chumboxes very often carry those images.

Also i'm not the only one, there's lots of other people who attest to the fact that chumboxes specifically use those kinds of images: http://ask.metafilter.com/247987/How-can-I-avoid-seeing-rela...

Re: LA Times and ads

#93

Post by athenot »

mos_basik wrote: post #85
megous wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's no good. You're still sending your primary address, before the +. They can remove or modify anything after +, and you'll still receive the email. I'm slowly transitioning for having a random 20 char generated alias email for every service/use and there's no chance anyone will hit a real mailbox by chance. If alias leaks, I can either abandon the service and block it, or change the registered email for the serv…

That sounds great, but the problem I see with the n-address approach is when you do actually want to search for a received email but you don't want to remember what inbox it went to. I can see workarounds - like feed them all to a gmail box and filter them into their own folders. Or load them all into a native email client as separate accounts. I felt that way about using a password manager and generating random pass…

You can configure your MDA to deliver mail for all these different addresses to the same inbox. What I did for a while was have 2 inboxes: personal mail and commercial. All the tagged emails went to the Commercial inbox. Either way my mail client (Mail.app) can easily search accross Inboxes and/or present unified views if I actually want everything together.

Re: LA Times and ads

#94

Post by mos_basik »

ue_ wrote: post #18
alrs wrote: post #13

Browse with w3m or elinks, problem solved.

Or Firefox/$free_software_browser with uBlock Origin + uMatrix, or NoScript.

>umatrix

Apt name. Had never heard of it before your comment. After some looking around its github wiki from my phone, this looks... powerful. Wow. Same maintainer as ublock origin, right?

+1 to my list of things to check out when I have a moment.

Re: LA Times and ads

#95

Post by NelsonMinar »

greglindahl wrote: post #50
NelsonMinar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400. Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than, say, 10 is the problem.

That's a terrible methodology, and makes the headline pretty inaccurate. (Edit: looks like the blog headline isn't inflammatory at the moment: did you change it, or did the HN poster insert the 24-hour figure?) I'm against bad ads as much as everyone else, but I don't think using a terrible methodology to criticize them is a good idea. Making clear what you measured would be much better, and actually leaving the thin…

Perhaps the LA Times webmasters could apply your suggested methodology and come up with a more accurate estimate and share it with us here. I've already done my service in pointing how how broken their ad scripts are on a normal page. I don't need to set up a full bandwidth monitoring rig for them, too.

To answer your question about the title, I did not change my blog post. Hacker News' silent moderators seem to have applied their usual policy of rewriting post titles to the article title, no matter how dull it may be.

Re: LA Times and ads

#96

Post by artursapek »

zkms wrote: post #33
lobster_johnson wrote: post #22

I develop software used by newspapers. This is a problem with the whole industry. It's amazing how much crap they load. These sites all use a third party "tag manager" (Google Tag Manager, Tealium, Piwik etc.) to manage the scripts they load: ads, analytics, trackers etc. The people who use the tag manager typically aren't techies, so they don't understand that adding another tag will cause the page to slow down. Typ…

The worst type of ad on newspaper sites are the disgusting "chumboxes" (by scumsuckers like "taboola" or "outbrain") that orbit at the bottom of pages and serve up images meant to be as simultaneously repulsive and fascinating as possible: https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b... As long as these pages have ads that display utterly gross images (if you doubt me, click the above link) that make…

> Chumbox

Had no idea there was a name for this shit! But of course there is. It's really sad that the most rotten apples have spoiled it for everybody. I was thinking recently about trying to set up a passive income website that makes money on Adsense, but got discouraged when I remembered that Adblockers are a thing.

Re: LA Times and ads

#97

Post by HeavenBanned »

panarky wrote: post #45
SwellJoe wrote: post #19

I resisted using an ad blocker for many years; I kinda felt like if I wanted to use a site, I should be willing to trade for seeing their ads. I've changed my tune a couple of years ago, and this is a (small) part of the reason (but a bigger part of it now that I know how crazy usage for ads has gotten). I'm on mobile data nearly 100% of the time most months. 14GB costs me $50-$70 (depending on which network I'm on,…

The LAT ads are so fat and intrusive, and their blocker blocker is so infuriating, that I recently just turned off JavaScript completely for their site. It means I don't get images or videos, but I can read the occasional article without going through unnecessary gyrations. It's not that I'm unwilling to pay for good journalism. I subscribe to the New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic. But the LA Times has…

> that I recently just turned off JavaScript completely for their site.

I started laughing so hard at this comment. It's so funny to me that someone would go to such great lengths to get the article unmolested. Thought I'd share my two-cents. I love reading HN sometimes. I will try this technique out, you can bet your bottom dollar.

Re: LA Times and ads

#98

Post by NelsonMinar »

lelandbatey wrote: post #74
NelsonMinar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400. Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than, say, 10 is the problem.

For the reference of others, I opened the LA Times on my computer and left the front page open for 10 minutes, and in that time it downloaded 48.7 MB of data.

Only 7 gigabytes a day! Perhaps the LA Times has already made their web site twice as efficient.

Re: LA Times and ads

#99

Post by anigbrowl »

They are also the most aggressive ad shoveling website I have ever seen. Their ad blocker blocker and paywall works, preventing me from reading articles.

It keeps working even when I have my ad blocker turned off. Obviously I must have some anti-tracking extension still enabled that it dislikes, but I'm not willing to spend that much time troubleshooting my browser. It's baffling to me, because the LAT is one newspaper I'd consider a digital subscription to, but as this article says the advertising/marketing people have clearly won out over the editorial, so fuck'em until that changes.

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