501–510 of 705 posts
> TOO MANY ADS CLUTTER THE MAP ...he complained, in an article on a website where 30% of vertical space is used by an autoplay video ad featuring an idiot asking me whether I'd eat "mustard Skittles". Ironic.
> Whenever I’m in a major metropolitan area, Google Maps seems to have an obsession with displaying as many hotels, bars, and clubs on the map as it can. This happens even when I haven’t searched for a single hotel or bar. All this data they slurp up about me, and they can't even figure out that I checked into my hotel and slept in it last night, and am probably not looking for another nearby hotel today. Or that I n…
Some cynically think they know and are just money grubbers. But I think they don’t know, because it’s hard. And there’s no motivation for them to know.
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Not directly related but last time I was this creeped out is when a antivirus company wanted to sell us crazy amount of data on our customers. Apparently AV companies lose money on the customer endpoint protection (it’s basically for free!) but make it up on selling users data. Also on the business licenses though
GeForce experience tracks every single window you have open, sending the title and window information, along with every single spot that you click on your screen to Nvidia, tied to your now mandatory account. That was a couple years back. Who knows how much more invasive it’s gotten since. Oh. And this data is considered to be “valuable debugging information”, so is not prevented by opting out of analytics.
We could create such nice things as a species, sad our tech seems to so often devolve into desperate greedy crap.
I worked on Google Maps monetization, and then on Maps itself. Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad. If you don't believe that, that's fine. "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Goo…
Even just the ability of search to serve local seeking queries is a huge defensive moat, but the marginal revenue from having a model of the world is worth it.
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What kills me is I'd easily pay 50~100 eur a month if Maps had to be non ad subsidized. This is to me Google's most everyday impacting product, and what makes the difference between me being stranded/lost or making it in time. The stories of people ending in a lake for blindly following directions are cheeky, but decent maps are just that important, and Google Maps, how flawed it can be, is currently the best for so…
You'd pay 50-100 euro a month ? Why ? How did you arrive at this number ? Even before google maps, the standalone navigation devices didn't cost that much. To stretch this, if maps is 50-100 a month, how much is the total bill of all software you use ? Surely, the h/w, OS, browsers etc. should be orders of magnitude more than what they are today too.
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Huh, I have uBlock on mobile and I still got the video - which is not an ad, it's just really shitty web design.
uBlock Origin is the correct one. I'm on firefox with uBO and have no video playing.
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Google Maps design is becoming less detailed over the years. It's really apparent when compared to OSM. It is necessary to search for a lot of things in Google maps as they are otherwise not visible. You can't really navigate off Google maps without turn-by-turn navigation. I wonder whether this is a strategic drive from Google to make maps more like search to enable advertising or whether they truly think this is th…
There was some articles on here about how maps have been changing over the years (also other map apps). The gist is that why would you need to show street names anymore? On printed maps that's the only thing you have, but that's not how most people navigate anymore. They search for a place or POIs and then use navigation. So the things most people care about have changed, streets are less important now and things lik…
I would usually look at the map briefly, see "we need Farm Lane, should be 4th on the right" and then look at the street name signs. In a non-residential area I'll often do this on foot, but if I'm cycling I'm more likely to think "Right after the paint shop" or similar.
It's inflammatory, but this website is worse. There's some video playing of a stranger eating mustard skittles taking up the bottom quarter of the screen.
Brave + PiHole + uBlock Origin = no video ad, no top banner ad Firefox + PiHole + no extensions = dumbass video, blank top banner ad (all the space is taken up but no content)
Maybe Brave has extra visual filters that block this specific div?