161–170 of 575 posts
Apple News and News+ represent everything wrong with modern Apple: a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. It is their most mediocre service, jarringly jamming cheap clickbait next to serious journalism in a layout that makes no sense. The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Ap…
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The best are the one trick doctors don’t tell you or the thing THEY don’t want you to know about. A lot of scams and cons are deliberately stupid looking and absurd to pre-select for gullible marks. It’s also why goofy conspiritainment shows are loaded with ads for quack medicines. Anyone who thinks we didn’t go to the moon will probably buy herbal dick pills.
I tried clicking one of those just to see and it didn’t even go to the alleged product but instead a landing page with even more of those ads! Shocking, I know :)
I love how, on the "I am retiring page", the image of the old woman even has artifacts of the Gemini logo on the bottom right - someone very probably manually tried to blur them with a tool that was not meant for blurring. Somehow, he or she was still convinced and put it up.
We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care. Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.
Generally if all the ads you see are scammy, it means you probably are using some form of tracking/privacy protection. When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots. When they don't really know who you are, only bottom feeders bid on the ad slots you see. In a way, it almost acts as retribution for not submitting to the anti-privacy machine.
On top of that, most ads provide no value whatsoever. Take the classic Coca-Cola vs Pepsi: they are fishing from the same pool so ads are primarily going to steal customers away from the other brand. Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing, so the ads are a net negative for society.
There is also of course advertising in order to inform your potential market that your product exists at all. But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already? And if two products seem to have the same features for the same price, the one which isn't heavily advertised is probably the better choice: it is likely already more popular for a reason, and there's a decent possibility that the money they aren't spending on advertising is going towards useful things like quality and customer support.
I completely understand why companies in a heavily capitalist society are spending money on ads, but you can't convince me that the world wouldn't be a more pleasant place without them.
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> legitimate advertisers Those two words definitely don't belong together.
My local supermarket advertising on YouTube that they have a sale on coffee this week is pretty legitimate. It just doesn't buy the Alphabet shareholders a new yacht. I truly don't believe that there is enough legitimate advertisers willing to buy ad space in Apple News (or elsewhere) to generate to profit Apple expects.
Scams, you see, make more profit per customer, and thus can afford to spend more on ads per customer. This creates an upward pressure on ad prices, on top of the extra ads sold.
This is why abuse prevention at major ad platforms is so consistently lackluster. They want to stop some scams, the most obvious and and the most illegal kind, so that they can say they tried - including to regulators, and to major companies that also buy ads from them and don't want their ads next to penis enlargement pills. But actually stopping all fraud and scams could cut into their profits in a meaningful way. So there's no hurry to build better ad quality control systems, not at all. Actively staying on top of ad fraud is paying more money to make less money.
Facebook is a major example of this kind of dynamic in action. They actually had internal estimates of how much it would cut their revenue to get rid of the majority of fraud, and were silly enough to put them in the writing.
We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care. Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.
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Ever since Apple moved to Services Strategy in 2014 it has been like this. Services were not there so they could provide a better experience for its " customers ". I use the word " customer " here which is what Apple / Steve Jobs used to call their loyal fans, and not user . But to further growth their Revenue pie because they foresee iPhone one day will stagnant. You now have Apple Fitness+, Apple TV, News, Music, A…
Arcade is comically poor value. I can't tell if Apple doesn't care, or they're just so deluded due to their insular nature and crap attitude towards gaming that they genuinely think its a good service to offer mediocre mobile games for a premium.
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Arcade is comically poor value. I can't tell if Apple doesn't care, or they're just so deluded due to their insular nature and crap attitude towards gaming that they genuinely think its a good service to offer mediocre mobile games for a premium.
I thought the same until my kids started playing iPad games. Apple Arcade is way better than the baseline of aggressive ads and micro transactions.
I've an avid Apple News user, and while I haven't seen the sorts of ads in the article, I do gets lots of ads for tax filing software. Namely, Intuit TurboTax. They are the only ads I ever get. What's more, if you even touch them while scrolling, it triggers the "download app" screen, even if I don't explicitly tap. This is new as of a few weeks ago.