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LA Times and ads

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Re: LA Times and ads

#71

Post by vlunkr »

zkms wrote: post #33
lobster_johnson wrote: post #22

I develop software used by newspapers. This is a problem with the whole industry. It's amazing how much crap they load. These sites all use a third party "tag manager" (Google Tag Manager, Tealium, Piwik etc.) to manage the scripts they load: ads, analytics, trackers etc. The people who use the tag manager typically aren't techies, so they don't understand that adding another tag will cause the page to slow down. Typ…

The worst type of ad on newspaper sites are the disgusting "chumboxes" (by scumsuckers like "taboola" or "outbrain") that orbit at the bottom of pages and serve up images meant to be as simultaneously repulsive and fascinating as possible: https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b... As long as these pages have ads that display utterly gross images (if you doubt me, click the above link) that make…

I left that article more confused than when I went in. I guess that's the logical conclusion of tabloid content.

Re: LA Times and ads

#72

Post by macintux »

bunnybender wrote: post #54
tedunangst wrote: post #31

So in case you were looking for another reason to avoid the LA Times (or probably tronc papers in general), they're very spammy. I get tons of junk "newsletter" mail from them that I definitely didn't subscribe to, although they inevitably claim I did, and you can unsubscribe, but then they just invent new lists. And sell your address to others. Sample from only a few days ago. From: "San Diego Union-Tribune" Subject…

I've used Mailhero in many places, works great! See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781361 or https://mailhero.io/

Also http://www.33mail.com/

Re: LA Times and ads

#73

Post by mahyarm »

bunnybender wrote: post #54
tedunangst wrote: post #31

So in case you were looking for another reason to avoid the LA Times (or probably tronc papers in general), they're very spammy. I get tons of junk "newsletter" mail from them that I definitely didn't subscribe to, although they inevitably claim I did, and you can unsubscribe, but then they just invent new lists. And sell your address to others. Sample from only a few days ago. From: "San Diego Union-Tribune" Subject…

I've used Mailhero in many places, works great! See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781361 or https://mailhero.io/

I want something like mailhero combined with a paid email provider like proton mail. Everything sent to $name@$spamkey.$mydomain.$tld would act like a mailhero address and forward to my personal address.

Re: LA Times and ads

#74

Post by lelandbatey »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #25
smaili wrote: post #7

> That’s a timeline of 30 seconds of page activity about 5 minutes after the article was opened. To be clear, this timeline should be empty. Nothing should be loading. Maybe one short ping, maybe loading one extra ad. Instead the page requested 2000 resources totalling 5 megabytes in 30 seconds. It will keep making those requests as long as I leave the page open. 14 gigabytes a day. It's not quite clear if 14GB/day i…

Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400. Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than, say, 10 is the problem.

For the reference of others, I opened the LA Times on my computer and left the front page open for 10 minutes, and in that time it downloaded 48.7 MB of data.

Re: LA Times and ads

#75

Post by cobookman »

makecheck wrote: post #46
cobookman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or on the flip side. Data caps will make people care about how much data their site uses. Cause customers will stop using data heavy sites as they have economic insentive not to. Making the web all around faster as no more 10MiB webpages, and making the industry move back to server side rendering.

It has been years since data caps though, and years of obnoxious ads, nothing has changed. The only way in my opinion to fix this is to (a) give phones HARD preferences on maximum data that cannot be exceeded and (b) give web browsers even stricter per-site settings with sane defaults. Then, let the ad companies fight within themselves to figure out how to deal with the fact that none of their content gets through an…

It's cause the data caps are fairly high. For example whats 10MiB when you have a 300GiB data cap.

But if we change to a utility like model people will start caring about penny pinching their bills

Re: LA Times and ads

#76

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

andai wrote: post #65
noir_lord wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using adblockers since they where a thing (and DNS blocks longer than that) since back then you could rely on the adnetworks feeding your malware at some point. I'm trying to think if I've ever clicked an advert on the internet intentionally and it's probably under half a dozen accidentally.

I wonder sometimes, with the amount these advertisers know about me, how come they don't know I don't click on ads? It would increase their profits to not target me.

They do know you don't click on ads.

They just show you ads for people who are going for exposure rather than clicks, because you count as an impression even if you can't be used to generate clicks.

Re: LA Times and ads

#77

Post by nebabyte »

panarky wrote: post #45
SwellJoe wrote: post #19

I resisted using an ad blocker for many years; I kinda felt like if I wanted to use a site, I should be willing to trade for seeing their ads. I've changed my tune a couple of years ago, and this is a (small) part of the reason (but a bigger part of it now that I know how crazy usage for ads has gotten). I'm on mobile data nearly 100% of the time most months. 14GB costs me $50-$70 (depending on which network I'm on,…

The LAT ads are so fat and intrusive, and their blocker blocker is so infuriating, that I recently just turned off JavaScript completely for their site. It means I don't get images or videos, but I can read the occasional article without going through unnecessary gyrations. It's not that I'm unwilling to pay for good journalism. I subscribe to the New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic. But the LA Times has…

I just use ublock's advanced mode to block scripts. Nicer than having a separate extension to do it (on Safari and like to keep it light) and is more or less a permafix. If (when) it breaks the layout I just click that built-in reader mode thing.

Re: LA Times and ads

#78

Post by [deleted] »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #25
smaili wrote: post #7

> That’s a timeline of 30 seconds of page activity about 5 minutes after the article was opened. To be clear, this timeline should be empty. Nothing should be loading. Maybe one short ping, maybe loading one extra ad. Instead the page requested 2000 resources totalling 5 megabytes in 30 seconds. It will keep making those requests as long as I leave the page open. 14 gigabytes a day. It's not quite clear if 14GB/day i…

Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400. Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than, say, 10 is the problem.

[deleted]

Re: LA Times and ads

#79

Post by rocky1138 »

SwellJoe wrote: post #19

I resisted using an ad blocker for many years; I kinda felt like if I wanted to use a site, I should be willing to trade for seeing their ads. I've changed my tune a couple of years ago, and this is a (small) part of the reason (but a bigger part of it now that I know how crazy usage for ads has gotten). I'm on mobile data nearly 100% of the time most months. 14GB costs me $50-$70 (depending on which network I'm on,…

For me it's not so much about seeing ads to help support a site, it's the fact that ad companies use all sorts of crazy black pattern ways of tracking you all over the web. It's just not safe to have any ads enabled.
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