I just want to use this space to say that I hate the fake AI-generated ripped tai-chi guy from the Youtube ads SO MUCH.
I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
201–210 of 575 posts
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#202We 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.
The only way out of this is to make ad platforms liable for scam ads. At the moment it's simply too profitable to print lies.
Kids today learning about the FTC and standards... we used to be a real country, with real laws that actually helped real people.
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#203Dear Tim Apple: you don’t need the tiny amount you get these ads. You do need to fix this embarrassing thing that you released called “Liquid Glass”
Sadly we are going to get more ads (Apple Maps is next). If it goes much further people will start questioning whether Apple products are worth the premium price.
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#204I prefer these types of ads. They're easy to identify at a glance and ignore.
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care. Completely agree. > Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things. There is no evidence that HN is not being actively astroturfed though. Sadly community filtering cannot replace trust in individuals.
Pre LLMs I would have said the all-text format of HN probably kept the astroturfing low, but these days I'm less sure. It's still a much less engaging format than almost any other place on the web, although again, with LLMs you can even cheaply target the lowest value returns.
You could read obvious shilling here pretending to like or pay and use the boringest B2B SaaS products way back too.
Trying to get a proper grasp of consensus on open forums is hopeless.
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#206We 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.
Alternative POV: the better they profile, you the better they can slip the scams past your defenses
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#207The weird thing about Apple News: as the article mentions, paying for “+” still shows ads, but not paying at all means you can’t see content that’s already free online.
Try it: when it tells you a story isn’t available without a subscription, search the headline and often the story can be read on its original source, for free.
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#208Don’t make me tap the “ads are cancer” sign.
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#209Apple 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…
Why can't they build their own ad network for control instead of partnering with 3rd parties?
Apple does have their own ad network. This is their ad network.
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#210Apple 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…
In fairness Apple did come up with a custom JSON format for articles:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenewsformat
The problem is that people don't use it. I imagine it's a chicken/egg thing, the audience on News isn't big so it isn't worth the publishers time catering to an entirely new format, the News experience is crappy so the audience doesn't grow.
They could have insisted that everyone use their format but I suspect publishers would just refuse. It's not exactly in a publishers interest to help boost a middleman between their content and readers.
I'd be really interested to see what Apple's approach would be if they used more web technologies (since that's what publishers are using today anyway). Even just a webview with disabled JavaScript would get a ton of the way there in terms of performance. They have WebKit engineers in house that could probably tweak it even further.