So glad to see others complaining about this. I am totally dismayed at the sluggishness of LAtimes.com. It was usable with an adblocker turned on but since being forced to turn it off recently the only computer I can use it on is a dual xeon with 32G memory and a modern gaming card and even then it's a struggle. I'm shocked that the this kind of botched hackery can exist at a major newspaper. It's ugly bad.
LA Times and ads
151–160 of 192 posts
Re: LA Times and ads
#152I 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,…
I genuinely do want to turn off my ad blocker and whitelist some sites, but the ad placement and intrusiveness is abhorrent nowadays. And now we have ad blocker blockers, as if that'll solve the problem. I'm in no way entitled to reading the article, but I've since resorted to just blacklisting JS from loading on some websites -- LA Times being one of them.
Re: LA Times and ads
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has been years since data caps though, and years of obnoxious ads, nothing has changed. The only way in my opinion to fix this is to (a) give phones HARD preferences on maximum data that cannot be exceeded and (b) give web browsers even stricter per-site settings with sane defaults. Then, let the ad companies fight within themselves to figure out how to deal with the fact that none of their content gets through an…
It's cause the data caps are fairly high. For example whats 10MiB when you have a 300GiB data cap. But if we change to a utility like model people will start caring about penny pinching their bills
In the US, and on wired connection maybe. In NZ the largest mobile plan I can even find has 5GB. Another one with flat rate for data is $50 for 3GB (so $250 for this 14GB day). If I load a webpage on my mobile data that uses 10MB of data, I want to know about it so I can shut that down (and never come back.)
Re: LA Times and ads
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work in IT for TRONC (parent company of LA Times), and can vouch for this. Some of the ad scripts are horrendously bad. Open firebug or chrome dev tools and load the page, watch all those errors pour in. We pay very close attention to our own code, but all those js bugs that are happening are related to external ad networks with terrible javascript. We have something in the neighborhood of 30+ ad partners. Some of…
I am very grateful that you're honest and open. I'd give you a respectful bow in person on that basis alone. That being said, I believe the media companies should start accepting the inevitable fact that people don't care about their financial struggles or hardships in finding ways to monetize content. As long as the said content is visibly free (even if it comes with strings attached as invisible tracking) then the…
You are writing a lot of stuff about wanting to pay for good journalism. Why not just simply subscribe to the Economist? Nobody's going to track you when you're reading a PDF. Probably especially not when you go completely offline. You could also listen to the ad free CDs.
There's also still physical newspapers. You could go up to your nearest little shop and, for just a few dollars really, try out a couple of the newspapers. You can get a different one every day, see how they compare, then you can subscribe to that one!
There, now you can pay for good journalism, and support that radical new monetization model.
Re: LA Times and ads
#155First, did others see this HN post?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13956807
RJ Reynolds recruiting guideline SPECIFICALLY wanted sales (or marketing) people with 2.8-3.1 GPA. NO wonder so many ad server tags by the sales/marketing types are FULL or errors.
Anyhow, the very first time I experience a Mac computer crash HARD was when I opened NYT.com. Yes NYT.com.
It was a typical Mon morning, around year 2011. I got into office, got coffee, tapped keyboard the Mac Keyboard to wake up my iMac and proceeded to open the website I opened every morning, nyt.com.
I noticed some flash based ad doing some fancy thing in the top banner. But whatever.
I continue doing my thing.
Wait what? My iMac is frozen. iMac! This can't be true. I frantically pound on keyboard but nothing works. Out of desperation, I finger it.
When it comes back up, I slowly bring things up one at a time. And I realize it was the NYT.com's flashy flash ad that caused the crash.
When I upgraded my slightly outdated Flash plugin in my Firebox, I could view the nyt.com homepage without my iMac freezing. I could HEAR the mechanical HD in my iMac grinding and CPU widget showing CPU spiking when I open nyt.com homepage.
Because of an ad on NYT.com, I'm pretty sure millions of people experienced their computer crash on that Mon morning.
Re: LA Times and ads
#156Garbage like this is one of the many reasons I've gone back to print to a large extent. Printed magazines are amazing things, a superior experience and product in almost every way to reading online outlets. This whole ethical conflict over how to deal with invasive advertising while supporting the work goes away when you bought and paid already before you even start to read. Daily news doesn't fit into this philosoph…
you can buy digital subscriptions to many newspapers, including the LA Times
Re: LA Times and ads
#157The data points for my hypothesis just keep connecting. edit: so I know, why does something this innocent get downvoted? I don't understand what I did wrong.
I think it's more like, you didn't do anything right! It sounds mysterious and all, but does not really benefit anybody else.
Re: LA Times and ads
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am very grateful that you're honest and open. I'd give you a respectful bow in person on that basis alone. That being said, I believe the media companies should start accepting the inevitable fact that people don't care about their financial struggles or hardships in finding ways to monetize content. As long as the said content is visibly free (even if it comes with strings attached as invisible tracking) then the…
You are writing a lot of stuff about wanting to pay for good journalism. Why not just simply subscribe to the Economist? Nobody's going to track you when you're reading a PDF. Probably especially not when you go completely offline. You could also listen to the ad free CDs. There's also still physical newspapers. You could go up to your nearest little shop and, for just a few dollars really, try out a couple of the ne…
Whatever one thinks of the Economist, they can't be the newspaper for the whole Earth. A broad view is important, but far from enough if one wishes to keep abreast of what's happening around them.
As for physical newspapers, I hear they were decent once, but nowadays they're all so shitty around here that I believe one is better informed by not reading them, as at least it's easier to keep an open mind on issues, than after having been fed heavily distorted facts.
Re: LA Times and ads
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently (past year) bit the bullet and began ad blocking myself. My primary concern is the recent proliferation of malicious content through the common ad networks. Supporting websites is great, but not at the expense of your own security.
Maybe we need smarter ad blockers. Publications right now have little incentive to improve their ads with regards to security, readers' resources or quality – because if the LA Times motivates you to install an ad blocker, the NYT is getting hit as well. The tragedy of the commoners, so to speak. If ad blockers would aggressively judge each publisher, ad network and/or advertiser and rewarded good behaviour by showin…
In other parts of the world they would find who is making those ads and who is in charge of those and burn their houses down or chop them with machetes. Suddenly the number of people willing to produce ads for clients and said clients is dramatically reduced.
I'm not suggesting this kind of extreme response, my point is there's no punishment for putting up those ads so there's no incentive to behave correctly and we're stuck in a spiraling vicious cycle. Breaking this cycle and turn into a virtuous cycle requires a paradigm shift and I'm afraid this is not going to happen by itself. Moving away from ads as a business model means wiping out google, facebook and a few others big players so whatever effort to emerge a new business model will be resisted by those who have the power and can burn money for years without even noticing it.
Until then I have two solution, the first is a combination of noscript[1] and ublock origin[2] in my browser and the the second is wallabag[3] which for the LAT page given as example gives this: http://share.pho.to/AegpU
[1]: http://noscript.net/ [2]: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock [3]: https://wallabag.org/en and https://wallabag.it/en
Re: LA Times and ads
#160I find sending LA times articles to Instapaper manages to get me a readable copy of the article. It's a bit more of a hassle, but worthwhile if the article looks really interesting.