title.replace(/(i now assume that |on apple news )/ig, '')
Very witty
I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
71–80 of 575 posts
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#72It’s a bit like that MSN page what MS is forcing on millions through Edge and W11 widgets
On top of that, that thing takes a bunch of fiddling in their own GUI to disable. I want a search bar for my home page. Nothing else. Then every once and awhile it will 'forget' its settings and put it all back. Edge/Chrome makes no difference to me it is the same code. But that first tab experience with edge is garbage. Probably why I mostly use Firefox still.
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#73We 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.
That, unfortunately has pushed advertisers into guerrilla marketing tactics like posts and comments disguised as genuine user behaviour. It means we now need to parse whether what we're looking at is an ad or not.
Maybe they would have done that anyway though.
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#74This is a bit silly. Are there any ads that people do trust?
While I understand the sentiment, most ads for a long time were fairly reputable? Like in the news papers, most ads were to make you aware of a brand (next car I buy I'll feel safe buying X because I've seen it in the papers), or to notify you about a local store having a sale etc. And disabling my ad blocker and going to a page I see ads for house listings nearby, offers to buy sports gear in a store in my city, and…
I dunno, I’ve been doing some genealogy research and looking at a lot of newspapers from the 1800’s. It’s striking to me how much they are essentially Facebook. Sure, on the front page there’s the news of the day, but on the inside are jokes, riddles, local notes on who visited who and where. And the ads. Literal snake oil! As well as all sorts of other sketchy tonics for curing any sort of “ill constitution”.
I think those of us on this forum likely grew up in a golden age of ads being relatively harmless, but I’m not sure that’s the normal state.
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#75We use a PiHole, plus ad-blocking browsers, so we see very few ads. According to Claude, around 40% of users in the West use ad-blockers at least some of the time.
You would think that advertisers would understand that they are killing the goose? They have made ads pervasive, annoying and untrustworthy. Hence, fewer and fewer people are willing to put up with them.
Perhaps enshittification will eventually hit a wall. One can hope.
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah it was always a trick scammers used. Scam emails (the more obvious ones - not sophisticated phising) always had typos or subtle grammar errors because authors don't want to invest time in people that are able to spot such mistakes. It's the people that do not read thoroughly that are much more likely to fall for a scam. I would imagine it might be the same with those ads.
> authors don't want to invest time in people that are able to spot such mistakes This "just-so" story gets repeated constantly in threads about scams, but I've never seen anyone put up any actual proof. The more likely explanation is that scammers are just bad at English since they're predominantly from poor third-world countries.
This is research from Microsoft that goes into more detail: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#77At this stage pretty much all ads on the internet are scams
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#78I 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.
I think a lot of people who grew up on the early web have that reflex
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
And where in the headline is "AI"?
"Here are three ads that are scammy; the first two were clearly generated by AI, and the third may have been created by AI."
The "AI" evangelists are trying to explain to us that all ads are to be trusted because they're "AI" generated now...
Re: I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
#80Surely what they make from these ads is negligible enough to not warrant the terrible user experience for something users pay for. The ads in Apple News are infuriating.