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Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

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Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#761

Post by mbrumlow »

Side note. I own a fairly recent Samsung TV. I pay for Google Priemium so I can let my kid watch some shows from time to time. Pepa pig and what not.

The issue is the built in youtube app constantly had to be logged out and back in. Otherwise advertisements start to show. Sometimes as often as wcey 4 minutes. And they are the worst sorts of advertisements geared to kids to ask parents to buy pointless plastic shit.

I am failey sure this bug is not being fixed because it would lower somebodiws revenue, or metric.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#762

Post by dragonwriter »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #417
reaperducer wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or make the X button almost the same color as the background. TuneIn does this.

There are a ton of dark patterns in web design about this. - same color background - in the wrong corner (users expect the "X" in the upper right hand corner). I've seen the "X" in the wrong corner and some other icon in the right hand corner. People reflexive will click in the upper right hand corner and open the ad by mistake - I've seen where you have to click on text instead of the "X", clicking on the "X" just o…

> 1-2 pixel "X"

An x requires at least 3×3 pixels.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#763

Post by spockz »

jancsika wrote: post #610
Nextgrid wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that a large part of this ad- and marketing-driven economy is based on this. The reason they predict their revenue will go up (which it will, at least in the short term until the market adjusts) is because they have a lot of customers already lined up to pay them to show ads on their TVs. Those customers' marketing departments decided to pay money to include their ads on TVs because a similar process was fo…

> (looking at the companies who buy Google AdWords on their own brand - if someone's searching for your brand on Google your website will already be the top result - a click on the ad is not a true "conversion" in this case and is just wasted money) Except that Google lets anyone else advertise in that slot above your brand. And as we've seen some companies can confuse the customers and steal them away in such an ad.…

This happened today to me. I searched for the “DigiD” app which is the 2FA app for your social services account with the Dutch government. The app was the second app. Even though it matched fully on the query. The first app was some other document scanning app from some vendor. I can imagine someone paying less intention would install the wrong app.

I’m actually considering whether it would be a good thing if the app stores would verify government applications and perhaps not even allow ads on queries which have results that include governmental apps...

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#764

Post by donor20 »

I know folks will totally TRASH apple if they did a walled garden TV - but for some of us we'd probably pay the extra just not to have to deal with / worry about the random scammers doing things like this. And I call this a scam when you spend this amount of money and the box doesn't have in bold letters (popover ads!).

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#765

Post by LordDragonfang »

hinkley wrote: post #689
dvtrn wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me started on dialog boxes that put the "cancel" button on the wrong side. Much like toilet paper, there is one way to display it, all other methods are heresy worthy of nothing less than immediate exterminatus. (partially kidding, but only partially.)

If you have cats, the 'proper way' to hang the TP is the opposite way of what you absolutists think is the One True Way. I'm starting to suspect that the loudest voices are cats who have either learned to type or to pay for lobbyists, trying to push your feline agenda on the rest of us.

Have had two generations of cats in our house, and always the toilet paper the proper way. Never had an issue.

On the other hand, we have to keep the toilet seat down or they'll try to drink toilet water.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#766

Post by monadic2 »

krustyburger wrote: post #703
gverrilla wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would you tell more about why you think ddg is not good? I'm not using it for some reasons so I'd like to know. Thanks

Not the original commenter, but before Google fully pivoted to their present focus on monetizing search, the results were often strikingly useful, even for obscure searches. DuckDuckGo can’t (yet) replicate this now-lost magic.

In my memory the quality of google searches peaked around 2009 or so I'm not sure I'd refer to it as a "present" effect....

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#767

Post by ArchOversight »

aronpye wrote: post #184
lucasverra wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also https://nextdns.io/ on the cloud. I run my ios devices with no ads thanks to this honest service. Can i modify the DNS resolver on a samsung tv (i do not intend to have one ever)

> you can but if it cant resolve it will fallback to googles resolver automatically. At least this is what happened on my model. I built my own router with a raspberry pi. I installed pi-hole and use that as a dns resolver. I then use an iptables rule to NAT / forward all dns traffic on port 53 to the pi-hole resolver, similar to how ISPs often intercept dns requests. This prevents IOT devices from bypassing the dns…

DNS over HTTP has screwed this up.

I'm just waiting for smart devices to start doing that instead, forcing me to set up full SSL filtering until they start doing encrypted SNI :/

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#768

Post by dastx »

victor9000 wrote: post #724
Phillips126 wrote: post #707

I purchased a Samsung TV about two years ago for $1,200. It was my first 4K TV and I loved it. I made the purchase around the same time I dropped my cable subscription, I just couldn't stand the advertisements anymore. The panel was thin (with almost no bezels), the picture quality was superb and I was sold on the "Smart TV" features like having built in access to Netflix, etc. For a while it was great, then I notice…

You could try using a pi-hole as your DNS server on your local network to block ads across all connected devices. https://pi-hole.net/

Software and hardware are increasingly hardcoding DNS servers. If you do use it, block DNS requests from all clients except your pi-hole on your router.

Also, be aware that systems can still try and resolve IPs using a different mechanism (e.g. if too many people start DNS blocking) or worse hardcode IPs. Pi-hole cannot sort those out. You'll need a more advanced firewall. Something like pfsense or the like.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#769

Post by LordDragonfang »

joombaga wrote: post #575
ascagnel_ wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d have less of a problem with this if they went about it the way Amazon sells ads on their Kindle e-readers: - You can buy the device for $X, and it’s marked as being sold “with special offers” (a euphemism for ads that would be more explicit in an ideal world) - You can buy the device for $X + $Y, and it’s marked as being sold “without special offers” - You can buy the device for $X “with special offers” today, bu…

One more option that was at least available on older Kindles - You can buy the device for $X “with special offers” today, then hack it and remove the "special offers". I don't know how prevalent this is, but wonder if it's a consideration in deciding on the "money to disable ads" strategy.

While it may not appear that way in the HN crowd, the number of users who actually jailbreak their devices is effectively zero when you're determining revenue models. Especially nowadays, when most of the features people care about have been implemented.

Re: Samsung TV owners complain about increasingly obtrusive ads

#770

Post by [deleted] »

dfxm12 wrote: post #449
tangjurine wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're in the middle of transitioning from making decisions based on pure intuition to being purely logical and data-driven... I wonder if that's such a good idea. There was this article a while back I read that talked about how native peoples made poisonous foods edible. Some processes were extremely convoluted and unreasonable, but it worked, and efforts by a "reasonable" man to make the process more efficient would…

It would be more correct to say that today, decisions are being based on increasing short term gain. I think that's the issue more so than transitioning decision making to be based on logic and data and also supports your conclusion about the economy better.

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