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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

#381

Post by vee-kay »

einr wrote: post #375
vee-kay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get any gaming laptop or corporate grade laptop. They'll look good, work well (from hardware perspective), and you can replace their built-in Windows OS with the Linux flavor/edition of your choice. By the way, if ultraportable is your idea of laptop nirvana, you can try... Samsung made awesome AI-powered laptops (the Samsung Galaxy Book5 and Book6), I got the Book5 few months back for my friend's son. It is sleek, l…

Get any gaming laptop Don't get any gaming laptop. Some of them are truly bottom of the barrel slop and it really matters that you do your research. (See, for instance, NuclearNotebook reviews on YouTube)

Maybe in current era of skyrocketing prices of memory & storage components (due to mindboggling demand by AI-driven tech industry), I would agree that budget gaming laptops are not worth the value.

But for decades, I have found that gaming laptops (decent brands and popular models) gave best bang for buck, especially with AMD hardware. My 12+ years old Lenovo gaming laptop is still going strong, and my 15+ years old Sony Viao netbook is also doing well (with SATA SSD and RAM upgrades few years ago).

But yeah, read/check up on the reviews (from reputed reviewers) before splurging for an expensive laptop.

One nifty trick to identify VFM(value for money) laptops is to check Amazon site/app for "Smartchoice" laptops. It is a special keyword that Amazon adds to listings of popular laptops that are VFM (best deals) and having good reviews.

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

#382

Post by red-iron-pine »

kneel25 wrote: post #160
makingstuffs wrote: post #33

I don’t know if it is just a symptom of growing up during the days of the net’s Wild West and navigating through sites like gamecopyworld or what, but I just seem to have some inbuilt filter which doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of ads. It’s hard to explain but it is like some subconscious filtering that occurs on a preRecognise hook or something. Weird.

Who doesn't think this about themselves. It's like when people say they're immune to propaganda. Isn't this thinking what makes people think their smart devices are listening to conversations rather than targeted ads you only notice after it's had the effect on you.

"marketing works on you, even if you know how marketing works on you"

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

#383

Post by Spivak »

jandrese wrote: post #260
benterix wrote: post #140

I'd generalize it to "I assume all ads on major platforms are scam." This includes especially channels owned by Google and Meta. I remember back in 2010 I had to wait a week and correct my ad before it was approved and now they basically stream all kinds of scams without checking. They do have quite a few people, they could build a better scam detection system but it's against their interests.

Yes. Facebook is especially bad about letting outright scammers buy ad slots.

Meanwhile in real life IG and TikTok ads are the only ones normal people seem to generally trust. I've only ever heard people talking about getting Instagram or TikTok ads for things and actually buying them in a way that would sound genuinely jarring if they said "an ad on Google."

I think there's something to be said for how IG and TikTok ads are actually made that makes them more appealing which is that they actually try to be worthwhile content to watch in a way banner ads and TV commercials just aren't.

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

#384

Post by derefr »

kyralis wrote: post #234
afavour wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

It's definitely that publishers don't want it. This is actually the trajectory of both Apple News and iAd before it, which is what started out providing the ad service for Apple News. Apple would like to do a high quality solution, and then keeps relaxing their standards when there's not enough buy-in from the content providers. They were forced to allow the non-curated news formats to have sufficient content.

I wonder why they don't just prioritize the ~500 most popular of those content providers that are feeding them sludge articles, and write (AI-generate, even) logic to manually parse and transform said sludge into their format?

It'd be a big one-time lift; and of course there'd be annoying constant breakage to fix as sites update; but News.app could always fall back to rendering the original article URL if the News backend service's currently-deployed parser-transformer for a given site failed on the given article. It's make things no worse and often better than they are today.

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

#385

Post by derefr »

afavour wrote: post #247
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.

The 10000ft perspective on AMP was correct, the lived reality was awful. And the technical implementation used can't be divorced from everything that surrounded it: Google's place in the industry with regard to search engines, ads, etc. In this specific example there is a very big difference between producing a format for use in a first-party app vs trying to replace standards for content used across the web.

> And the technical implementation used can't be divorced from everything that surrounded it: Google's place in the industry with regard to search engines, ads, etc.

I mean... sure it could have? There could have been an independent "AMP Foundation" that forked the standard away from Google and owned the evolution of it from then on. Like how SPDY was forked away from Google ownership into HTTP2.

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

#386

Post by sfRattan »

ruszki wrote: post #378
WarmWash wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t think that it’s possible to not have a strong profile on you. I’m using Librewolf with a ton of anti fingerprinting tools, separate sessions for everything, blocking any ads, social media SDKs, Google things, like Analytics, don’t even use Google anywhere for search etc on a Debian. Yet, Google knew immediately when I started to play Minecraft. The only connection was embedded YouTube videos on Minecraft wiki…

I take a number of steps to obscure my identity from advertising/surveillance networks and data brokers, and I know ultimately they'll still have profiles on me that are probably extensive.

Don't give up! Even if failure to prevent some data collection is inevitable, we can all help reduce the aggregate value of shadow profiles assembled by advertisers:

Block all ads. The bits that cross the threshold onto your networks and devices are yours to display or not. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a petty tyrant.

Help friends and family to block all ads. React to ads in their homes and on their devices the way you would to nonconsensual, graphic, violent pornography.

Keep blocking ads and tracking even though you know shadow profiles built about you continue to exist. It's only partially about confounding surveillance. It's also, and equally, about changing culture.

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

#387

Post by MBCook »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #304
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TV is pretty good even for my English sensibilities. Severance is some of the best television I’ve seen in a long time.

Commercials in TV+ are as bad as ads in News+, e.g. it seems I cannot open the app without getting blasted at with a Peacock commercial.

What? I’ve never seen a single commercial on an Apple TV+ show.

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

#388

Post by chrisweekly »

dlcarrier wrote: post #373
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TV is pretty good even for my English sensibilities. Severance is some of the best television I’ve seen in a long time.

Which makes it even more tragic that the few good streaming shows produced recently are all on a network no one watches. I am glad that they bought the rights to Brandon Sanderson's books, because I know Netflix wouldn't do them justice and Amazon prime would be far worse than that, but it also means that it will have a tenth of the available audience that a Netflix contract would have brought.

Hmm, your comment resonates in principle [caring about quality production of worthwhile narratives], but your specific examples show how much YMMV when it comes to subjective preferences. I was so grateful that Amazon Prime somehow did justice to The Expanse [I highly recommend the novels, and feel the show was one of the best-ever translations of sci-fi to the screen] and could never get into the Wheel of Time book series [tho I guess that was Jordan, not Sanderson, shrug].

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

#389

Post by ninth_ant »

pupppet wrote: post #57

Like a cancer, a publicly traded company must grow at any cost.

I can infer from the neglect that Apple News has been a failure for them and they are keeping it going to avoid consequences for shuttering it. Or if not a failure, it’s not enough of a success to give the product sufficient attention.

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

#390

Post by shermantanktop »

smt88 wrote: post #291
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TV is pretty good even for my English sensibilities. Severance is some of the best television I’ve seen in a long time.

TV productions are a product, not a service. Apple TV is the service.

Apple has a tv service and Apple also has exclusive content, which they brand with “Apple TV”…so it’s kind of both.

Same for the other big streaming services. Some of them (Netflix, Prime Video) are more involved in content production, up to and including having production facilities and an in house staff. But a lot of the “exclusive” branded content is made by semi-independent production companies.

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