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You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

mastodon.technology

241–250 of 318 posts

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#241

I feel browsing the web is long overdue having a robot butler to do it for us and come back with the things we wanted, leaving the "People in Norwich are using this genius trick"-style nonsense on the cutting room floor. It ought to be trivially possible, going on from things like grease monkey and ad blocking scripts to add a bit of user intent guessing / content filtering / simplified view logic.

>a robot butler to do it for us and come back with the things we wanted,

That's what an RSS reader does.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#242

Is the point of the video to make users stay longer? How long do they need the user to stay in order to improve their ad profit. Here is an idea, obnoxious webmasters: add an interstitial timer, "your article will be ready in ...". It's less intrusive and i might even tolerate that if it's less than ... 9 seconds. I m sorry that google and FB are sucking up all your revenue, i d like to help

my mom still has msn has her home page because she's always had msn as he home page. many computers later she still sets it as her homepage. She went from there to their games pages, their chatroom pages, who knows that else. So they exist. They're just not very tech savvy, and they like the way its been since thats the way its always been, even if they have to change it to make it so.

What homepage would you prefer her to have?

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#243

Not just news sites, either. A lot of fandom wikis run on the same platform, fandom.com. That site is a pain in the absolute fucking ass to use on any mobile device, specifically because of the autoplaying video that takes up half the screen on every page load . Weirdly, desktop is fine; no autoplaying videos or any such nonsense. It's only on mobile that Fandom has seemingly made a deliberate effort to make the user…

Every time I use Fandom without logging in, I will be faced with similar experience. A pop-up video with ads about the content it tried to promote (sometimes related to the content of the Wiki I visited, but mostly not) will play automatically, and I have to stop it every time.

As I am a contributor to some of the Fandom Wiki, I have to log in in order to make the promoted video goes away, which it did. But logging in in order to get rid of it is not a solution to this. Video shouldn't be popped up like this, let alone played automatically. I would tolerate a static ad to some degree, but this is not what I'm willing to.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#245
I worry that ad-blockers and similar contribute to this.

I, as a nerd, get to bypass all the dark patterns, either by just being informed, using specialized tools or other workarounds that let me use the service (and so increase its reach) but let others take the hit in getting sucked into the adverts or rage-based communities.

It feels like there should be a social movement to use tools that don't employ these tactics on anyone. It might mean a short term reduction in quality of life, but it equally could be long term beneficial.

How many people struggled with a thousand different sub-par experiences for decades so that today Valve can launch a handheld Linux based gaming PC with Wine based emulation of basically their entire catalog.

It's an amazing collective achievement of society, but many people take the short term view because 5 or 10 or 15 years ago it seemed outlandish that X could ever be achieved with open code and shared data. How can we get more people to take the better long term view? "Would you want your kid to use this app?"

App idea: take the core code of an open source ad-blocker, make it slightly less harsh, but totally block any site that fails it's tests rather than block only the ads. Provide alternate news stories or whatever from sites that are better. Similar to Google punishing deceptive sites, but decentralised.

(I've noticed this recently with Google provided news stories. They let me say "I'm not interested in topic" and "not interested in this specific site" which I use whenever the clickbait annoys me, but there's no generic "no clickbait please" option, nor any way to help protect other users from it who may be unaware of the dangers)

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#246

If they can trigger a "video fired" message in the analytics, that's one more "Person viewed our video" they can show to a potential advertiser. That's all it's about, not the end user's experience.

Having worked on video delivery, first play is not paid much attention. In most VPAID supported ads -one of the standards for video ad delivery- you have events fired at set intervals which are what is actually looked at when evaluating a placement value.

A placement that has high first play rate but a terrible 5sec event firing will just be worth nothing. In a programmatic world it means you'll get little to no bids for it or a default placement with payment in the fraction of cents per thousands.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take a particularly dim view on websites that have these. I don't care if that's how they make their living - they are making money by scamming people.

The sites themselves are aware of this reputational damage risk, and discuss this openly. https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/a-merger-of-chumbox-monger...

I love that I got a popup modal asking for my email address on that page

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#248
Second kind of fuckery of this sort: you watch a video about A, and it auto plays a video about a completely unrelated B. There is no option to switch this off (hello, Independent news online).

Just no. Seriously. That gets me to block your entire video player.

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The issue is twofold - in the internet era, the marginal utility of any additional news source is near zero. Sure, you might cross-check an article once in a blue moon, but most people consume news through a link that was sent to them by someone inside their bubble. And once they read the headline, there's 0 reason to click to another link with the same story ever again. So the links might as well be hosted in…

Don't forget the far more common access barrier. The White House press room and its analogues only hold so many people.

There needs to be a politician-journalist. Elected in second place who:

- Keeps the 1st place winner on their toes

- Reports to the losing voters

- Can do local news

- Can talk to people

Otherwise, all those hopeful candidates go back to focusing on their living and leaving those "losing" voters without any representation (seriously, how can there be no representation for the leftover votes and assuming they're not rich).

Re: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting

#250
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you hadn't noticed, extensions have to be signed by the browser vendor, so that you can run them. A few people who re-compile their Firefox or Chromium to get rid of that requirement will not make a great DDoS botnet.

Well, I have not noticed, because last time I wrote a Chrome extension, I just had the .js files in a directory and I could easily add it to Chrome with developer mode on. I imagine it would be possible with this extension as well. Things may have changed since then, I have not checked.

Right, similar option to load add-on temporarily is in Firefox. The add-on will not persist across restarts, though.
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