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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

#461

Post by nkrisc »

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…

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

Don’t threaten me with a good time. Most of what’s on the Internet should not exist and the world would be better without.

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

#462

Post by lloeki »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #456
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which you can quickly skip past.

What’s your point, exactly? They are still commercials.

To me there's a very distinct difference between unobtrusive same-service tasteful trailers and entirely unrelated third party ads.

I genuinely discovered great series and films that I enjoyed a lot but I would not have watched otherwise (e.g Shrinking).

This is true for cinema as well.

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

#463

Post by TheDong »

vee-kay wrote: post #24
isoprophlex wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what do i move to? No linux laptop feels as good to touch as the aluminum macbooks, and in terms of phones it can't get any worse than the ads-and-trackers shitshow that is android...

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…

> you can replace their built-in Windows OS with the Linux flavor/edition of your choice.

From the arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Samsung

> Samsung Book5 - Internal Speakers not working on linux

Also, it caps out at 32GiB of ram, I feel like these days that's pretty low for anyone who uses javascript heavy webpages. Like, my firefox on linux is currently using 42GiB of memory, and that's with under 200 tabs open, and then when I build my nixos config, that usually takes another 10-20GiB of memory

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

#464

Post by dizhn »

regenschutz wrote: post #319
dizhn wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use adblock and what ends up happening as a consequence is the ads I do see are the shittiest of shitty ads that don't even come from a recognized network. :)

If you see any ads at all, then your adblocker isn't aggressive enough. I don't think I have seen a single ad since I installed uBlock Origin, but I also installed s bunch of extra filters first thing I did.

Ehh.. depends on how questionable the sites you're visiting are. :)

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

#465

Post by direwolf20 »

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…

YouTube lets you pay about $20 per month for no ads. The money is divided among the creators of the content you watch. These creators noticed you weren't being frustrated by ads, so they added ads back in to their videos. Now for no ads you need SponsorBlock as well.

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

#466

Post by direwolf20 »

hunterpayne wrote: post #405
autoexec wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself. The idea that the internet couldn't exist without ads is a myth that needs to die. The internet existed, thrived, and was awesome long before it became infested with ads. An ad free internet would be different in some ways, but it'd still be great and filled with endless amounts of content. Your example of youtube kind of proves the point. It was so much mor…

Most people are cheap (or broke). As such they will take for free when they can. In markets like that, ads win out. You should take a look at what happens to human behavior when you change a price from free to tiny (like a penny or a dollar) but non-zero.

I'm happy when a news website gives me two buttons: watch ads, or pay 3.99/m for a subscription, even though I usually click on watch ads. Agency matters.

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

#467

Post by direwolf20 »

munk-a wrote: post #361
WarmWash wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Things need to be paid for but not everything needs to be paid for by everyone and most things are far cheaper than you'd expect. I played a MUD (and met my partner there!) for several years in college and afterwards. Initially I offered no financial support (since I was a starving college student) but when I had a job I sent in 10 bucks a month. That was a quarter of the cost to run a server, website and forum for a…

News sites don't really have reporters or editors any more. The news is reposted from AP/Reuters and the editor is an LLM.

You mentioned the NYT in particular — they're paid a lot to shill political positions.

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

#468

Post by direwolf20 »

threetonesun wrote: post #108
matheusmoreira wrote: post #94

Earlier 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.

There are very obvious flagging patterns around certain kinds of politics.

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

#469

Post by direwolf20 »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #453
wasmainiac wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> trusted communities like HN Please don’t. I’ve been here for a years under different usernames. I feel more and more bots or other actors are starting to infiltrate.

> I’ve been here for a years under different usernames The guidelines ask that you don't do this. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : > Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.

You don't have to do things that other companies would like you to do, no matter how emphatically they are stated. Just the other day I replied to a comment complaining about how LinkedIn broke Google's ToS. As if that's somehow a problem.

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

#470

Post by direwolf20 »

an0malous wrote: post #167
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.

There’s plenty of scams on HN, people don’t notice the successful ones

And YC. Scams make successful companies. Evil as well. Flock was a YC startup, as well as some cryptocurrency scams I don't remember.
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