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I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

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Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

#261

Post by testing22321 »

elashri wrote: post #68

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.

I have not had ads in my life in any form for two decades.

I don’t have a TV, don’t listen to the radio or read newspapers or magazines. I live in a small town with no metro, no billboards. I buy things I need like milk and vegetables, I don’t buy things that require ads for me to know about.

I Adblock the web aggressively.

Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

#262

Post by kemayo »

Analemma_ wrote: post #233
D13Fd wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fitness+ is actually super high quality, really well integrated with Apple’s products, and fun to use. I love it. I would happily pay the monthly Apple fee just for fitness+. I hope they don’t change it. If there is anything that represents a “services strategy” like the Apple of the Jobs era, it’s fitness+.

Fitness+ is okay-ish but it’s not getting any attention and I don’t think it deserves its $10/month price. Non-Apple fitness subscriptions at the same price are far better. Just for starters, what if you have two people in the house who want to do a Fitness+ workout together? Too bad: even if they both pay for it, one gets the nice tracking and HUD and the other gets squat. This is an obvious and trivial feature, and…

I dunno, I think that multiple people doing a workout together in the same at-home room is a bit of an edge case for this app. I have a not-tiny house, and I don't have a space where I could do that without having to move heavy furniture around first. People who live in apartments are really out of luck.

They do support syncing up the workouts of people who're each using their own device: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101979

Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

#263

Post by digiown »

WarmWash wrote: post #235
digiown wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you block ALL ads. Starve the beast. If an app has ads, I do not use it, end of story.

Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself. Even HN itself is a massive ad. We are lured here with tech links so YC companies can fish in curated waters for workers. That is explicitly why this board is hosted. The real fix is paying money for everything, but as evidenced by the many attempts at this, no one actually wants to pay. People overwhelmingly want to block ads and backdoor subscriptions. For e…

> HN itself is a massive ad

I don't think it is the same. There is no manipulation involved here and many people seem to be looking for jobs actively.

> no one actually wants to pay

Two things

1. Most content is actually pretty worthless. It's subsidized by the ad-surveillance industrial complex. Even in the pre-LLM times there is so much blogspam, content farm articles, and slop videos because of this.

2. Payment monopolies have made microtransactions uneconomical through fees, which contributes to the friction of paying. I imagine in an alternate world with a crypto or fiat based digital currency with low enough fees, there would be much more direct payments. Seriously, if you just pay one cent per Youtube video, it'd dwarf the ad income for most channels. Your attention is hilariously worthless.

Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

#264

Post by MarkusQ »

WarmWash wrote: post #235
digiown wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you block ALL ads. Starve the beast. If an app has ads, I do not use it, end of story.

Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself. Even HN itself is a massive ad. We are lured here with tech links so YC companies can fish in curated waters for workers. That is explicitly why this board is hosted. The real fix is paying money for everything, but as evidenced by the many attempts at this, no one actually wants to pay. People overwhelmingly want to block ads and backdoor subscriptions. For e…

>> That's why you block ALL ads. Starve the beast. If an app has ads, I do not use it, end of story.

> Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself.

So be it.

It's like someone realizing that their crack dealer is an untrustworthy scumbag who is destroying everything the care about and they need to totally cut ties with him, and a friend objecting "Unfortunately, the 'scumbag' is your crack supplier himself."

Yeah, we know that. If starving the beast means we have to give up our unhealthy addictions, it's probably a side benefit rather than a counter argument.

Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

#266

Post by skygazer »

mikestew wrote: post #219
givinguflac wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can definitely block ads- try NextDNS.

I’ve tried blocking the ads with a pi-hole, to no avail. I suspect the ads come from the same servers that the articles do. I can’t find obvious ad servers in the query logs. If anyone has a hint on blocking Apple News ads at DNS, I’d love to hear it.

1Blocker, with their in-app tracker blocking turned on, will block Apple News ads on iOS/iPadOS and will also block ads in Google News and free to play games. I guess you can’t block tracking without also blocking the ads. It installs a local VPN profile that blocks connections to hosts typically blocked with dns based ad blockers. They’ve increasingly hidden the feature in the app, for some reason.

Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

#267

Post by the_other »

Andrex wrote: post #249
tsunamifury wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost like Google AMP was a good idea and solving this problem this community had a melt down over it.

AMP was a good technical solution for a short window of time, deliberately tanked by confusing/centralized stewardship. They kept opening it more and more but by then it was too late.

No it wasn't. It was a tool to attempt to keep people on Google's surface area rather than freeing them to browse the web as the web was intended.

Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

#268

Post by dns_snek »

xwkd wrote: post #182
ksec wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Over the past decade, there's been a lot of regulation forcing Apple to open up their "Apple only" integrated platforms. It used to be the case that if Apple wanted to build a walled garden / cathedral, then in order to compete in the hardware marketplace they had to provide software that didn't suck. You knew that if you bought an Apple product, there was reasonable assurance that everything was tightly integrated.…

Can you support this unfalsifiable reasoning beyond blaming a convenient political scapegoat? Which paragraph of which article of which regulation requires them to deliver low-resolution PDFs in Apple News, for example? What about all the other issues?

Your argument essentially boils down to: If Apple doesn't get to do whatever they want without compromise, their execs get too discouraged and depressed to innovate. The obvious conclusion is that the only way we can enjoy the unrivaled genius of Apple is to give them a blank check to do whatever they want.

Every act of consumer protection and every form of pro-competitive regulation is twisted and exaggerated, no matter how insignificant it is to their bottom line or product functionality. The world is ending any time they don't get their way and when the world doesn't end, this decision becomes the scapegoat for all of their future faults, missteps, and bad performance. They can never do anything wrong and nothing is ever their fault, it's so so incredibly tiring to listen to this.

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