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Comment by lol768 | Hacker News Reader

> The Taboola news carousals at the bottom of most slow loading actual news sites are filled with total junk.

This, a thousands times. For both Taboola and Outbrain it's clickbaity trash - usually misleading and low quality content. They're designed to "disrupt" so that people click on them and have in the past featured on blatantly false news stories. I'd honestly be ashamed to work at one of these sort of organisations and it further underlines how awful the web experience can be if you're not using an ad blocker.

It's no surprise to me that AMP is popular among users if news sites are not including such garbage in their AMP renditions.

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It's interesting that so many people would enjoy AMP, because on my Android, viewing AMP sites in Google's main app often feels much slower than regular web browsing in Firefox for Android.

The difference? I have an ad-blocker in Firefox, but not in Google's app.

So Ad-blocking > AMP > Regular (as far as user-experience from a speed perspective). Obviously Google has a lot of incentive to make sure people don't go the ad-blocking route.

Though not sure what is keeping ad-blocking from growing given its superiority - likely just a lack of awareness about the option. If ad-blocking ever did grow massively though, the internet would change in ways we haven't yet seen. Either ad-serving companies would win the arms battle and ad-blockers would become ineffective, or, the web would have to move to a new payment model (Brave-like perhaps).

I'm not entirely sure what the ideal is - likely a model where users can choose between ads or micropayments is the most pragmatic world.

I remember this being speculated heavily as one of the most important reasons for Google implementing AMP in the first place.

Firefox Focus is the fastest android browser experience. I use that as my default browser, and only swap to normal Firefox when using a site I need to login to

Google AMP on iOS is also much worse than Safari + adBlocker. AMP also leaves out relevant content.

My beef is that it used to jack the scrolling. I don't know if it still does.

Considering the percentage of news sites that can't even scroll properly on iOS, I'm not sure this is a bad thing.

This has been partially fixed. AMP no longer scrolls at a different rate than other websites, but it still doesn't collapse the URL bar when scrolling.

A huge pet peeve of mine was that I'd google for something I once saw on Reddit, or maybe I just wanted to see a certain discussion. Google would identify the correct post, but then I'd either get it in AMP or new-redesign format, both of which present a terrible loss in readability (for the most part).

With AMP in particular, there was no obvious link back towards Reddit itself. And with the redesign, the actual discussion was interrupted with sections showing what other posts you could read on the subreddit. Similarly, both lost the essential hierarchy and it was really hard to follow the threads of discussion.

The whole thing was dreadful compared to using the decade old Reddit design. The modern stuff is crap.

I think the trick is to go to google.com with Desktop Mode (iOS: share page from Mobile Safari then scroll bottom icons left, I think).

That:

(A) gets Google to return desktop links (rather than cruddy mobile links)

(B) gets the site to show the desktop version rather than the cruddy mobile site.

It is more obvious how to do it on Android (google.com in Desktop Mode), but I do it on the iPad at work when needed.

(iOS, tap and hold on reload button to request Desktop Site)

Heh I uninstalled reddit is fun a while ago to limit my procrastination. Worked well. But I reinstalled after about a week because I search for things on Reddit via Google regularly.

Reddit has some disturbing dark patterns going on.

You can't view a page on their site without being nudged to use their app. And you're asked every single page view. Like take a damn hint please.

I'd be ok with the asking but they use different popups with the "no, go away" answer in different places with different wording.

This is all exasperated by AMP, I have to click the amp banner twice to load the real url, this then prompts to open in reddit is fun. Prompts because I want this to happen only sometimes.

It was these dark patterns that prompted me to really step back and re-evaluate what I wanted to get out of Reddit.

I set a hard timer on the app and focused on surfing Hacker News instead (since I wanted to keep abreast of tech news). I still browse /r/politics for popcorn purposes, but otherwise no other subreddits. To my surprise today I realised I hadn't opened Reddit and didn't even miss it at all.

Thanks. You have just convinced me to never browse reddit again, and I've been on it since 2007.

The best of both worlds is to use Firefox to handle the AMP site links from Google Now, or Google Feed, or whatever it is called now. Fast, and with ublock.

The only problem I've ever seen is that stories from tomshardware do not load in firefox mobile unless I replace the amp in the URL with a www.

You can use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ to have AMP sites automatically redirect to the non-AMP version.

I think the ads you get from Taboola put you through a really awful funnel to weed out one-eighth wits and anybody else smarter.

It's like the "grooming" that a pedophile does or the badly spelled message you get from some Nigerian prince or somebody who says you won some lottery that you've never entered or even heard of before.

If you click on Taboolah links and manage to sit through a 45 minute video of somebody droning on and using words they can't pronounce (e.g. "Bih Seph A Nol A" as opposed to "Bis Phenol a") you just might be dumb enough to punch in your credit card number and get an $80 a month supplement that you can never cancel.

If it wasn't so offputting to ordinary people more complaints might go to the FTC and they might have something to fear from the authorities. As it is, public servants are paid too much to spend hours just to find out what the scam is if somebody reports it.

I saw an ad in one of those chum boxes[1] yesterday that was a common one, "drivers in [your city] are shocked by this new law." However, I noticed something right away about it that stuck out like a sore thumb - I live in the Northeast, for those who are unfamiliar with the Northeast, we have a lot of trees and greenery here, every year I have to crawl into my bushes and pull trees growing in there and pull trees that start growing in the foundation of my house and along my fence line. However, the picture was of some women being arrested in (what I would consider) a desert.

IDK, just a really weird juxtaposition that stood out to me.

[1] https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...

dumb question: do Taboola and Outbrain try to infer the user's demographics based on the clickbait "news stories" the user clicks?

e.g. some of these "stories" appeal specifically to fans of a particular TV show or actor from a specific time range.

No, and they have little reason to do so.

They throw spaghetti at the wall, cater to low quality publishers and use your location to clumsily make it seem like the content is relevant to you with the most clickbaity headlines known to man.

But the thing is ... it works. People are clicking on this nonsense and other people are paying for those clicks (and publishers making money in the process).

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