I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
kirkville.com
kirkville.com
The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Apple sells. Worst of all, Apple had the leverage to revolutionize a struggling industry; instead, they settled for a half-baked aggregator.
It’s a toxic mix of Apple tropes that simply weren't thought through. The ads are the cherry on the cake.
Of course I hate that I can't block ads, but at the same time, I wonder if the unblockable ads are not, in fact, a help for that "struggling industry".
Looking at what gets blocked when I open the News apps, try going for these domains:
news.iadsdk.apple.com
news-app-events.apple.com
news-sports-events.apple.com
news-events.apple.com
You now have Apple Fitness+, Apple TV, News, Music, Arcade. None of these are of any quality of what Apple used to be. It is really sad.
Oh and the most iconic thing? Apple was the one who tried to kill internet ads between 2017 - 2020.
"user" is a worse term. It suggests that the "user" is simply utilizing the provider's products/services, and therefore they can't really complain about whatever the provider chooses to do in return, because the "user" can simply stop using.
It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create.
You're drawing a connection that's not there. It's indeed not a coincidence, but just because both situations fit the definition of the word "user" (and "to use").
People use drugs, whether they're addicted or whether they're taking a one-off dose given to them by a doctor. They are a customer in that situation if they're buying the drug from somebody (illegal dealer, pharmacy), but they're a user whether they paid or not.
Likewise, someone is a customer if Apple's if they paid for, or are expected to pay in the future, a device or service. But they're a user regardless of whether they're using a phone they bought, or a service that's being provided for free.
People can use services provided by charities, they can use skis on a mountain... there's absolutely no negative connotation to its general definition, it just happens that some things people use are bad and some are good.
In my mind, “user” stated to take over when we started having web based services that were used by people, but they were the ones paying. For example, Google and Facebook. Both got paid through ads, so they advertisers were the customers. The “users” were just the eyeballs the advertisers wanted to reach. So, you had to make your service compelling enough for someone to use for long enough that they’d see enough ads to make it profitable to provide the service.
It’s more akin to talking about “viewers” or “viewership” when talking about more traditional media.
For Apple, they are generally looking to get paid by the ultimate consumer of the product. So to them, we are the customers.
Maybe I'm just old, but we've called ... users ... 'user' since Unix or before. Perhaps it is just because Unix was integral to my early computing experience that I see it that way.
I'm the (super-)user of my Linux PC. I have total ownership and control over it.
Arguably "customer" makes the business relation to the provider of a service/device clearer.
The term I hate with a burning passion is "consumer".
"customer" represents a two-sided relationship, and I do feel that "user" is kind of one-sided, but gives agency, a user will use a product for their own purposes, presumably to help them achieve some kind of goal. A "consumer" is completely passive, their main goal is to do what the company tells them to do. A customer can walk out of the relationship, a user might complain about problems they have with your product, but the consumer will simply continue consuming whatever you want them to consume.
The worst part though, they seem to be mostly correct in their assessment.
If there is anything that represents a “services strategy” like the Apple of the Jobs era, it’s fitness+.
Just for starters, what if you have two people in the house who want to do a Fitness+ workout together? Too bad: even if they both pay for it, one gets the nice tracking and HUD and the other gets squat. This is an obvious and trivial feature, and it’s nowhere to be found. I could maybe see it getting cut for the launch checklist if people were behind schedule, but Fitness+ plus is more than five years old now, there is no excuse.
It’s total abandonware from a company trying to do the absolute minimum to get your recurring subscription.
They do support syncing up the workouts of people who're each using their own device: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101979
What? Abandonware? They are constantly posting new workouts that are thought out and well produced. The Fitness+ app is very well maintained. It works great. It has cool features. Honestly I don't know what you are talking about, here.
I've worked out together with one to three other people several times. No one cared that their heart rate wasn't shown on the screen. It's really not an important feature and a very niche use case.
iOS is so far behind in this regard that even uttering it in the same sentence as "gaming" almost exclusively implicates gachapon titles or microtransaction slop. Other platforms don't suffer as much.
However, I’ve been subscribed to it since its inception because it is the best way to have games that my kid can play without shady ads or engagement practices.
I know that is not going to last, as my kid is now a pre-teen and likes other types of games (like Hollow Knight) that are not available on Apple Arcade.
But the current state of the gaming industry is terrible, especially on mobile. Indy companies producing games like Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, and Stray are good, and there is the extremely rare case of Larian. But other than that, the market is full of dark-UX patterns to promote app purchases. Mobile apps are a minefield of gacha games that should be forbidden for kids.
Apple one is a steal IMO. Apple TV, Fitness+, 2TB, Arcade, and other smaller perks like News+ make it an easy sell. Compared to something like Netflix? Netflix is $25/mo for their top tier streaming alone. Apple TV consistently has higher quality content. So does Apple Arcade and Apple Fitness...then you get 2TB of storage to back your crap up to.
Ask Google or Samsung what they are doing for the cost of an Apple One subscription.
Not a fanboy or anything. I'm basically critical of all tech companies, however, Apple is doing something that is working well for them.
They raised it a while back to $7/month.
Like Angry Birds, the official version is fucked up to the gills with ads
Same for the other big streaming services. Some of them (Netflix, Prime Video) are more involved in content production, up to and including having production facilities and an in house staff. But a lot of the “exclusive” branded content is made by semi-independent production companies.
And of course the device itself. I wish they would have distinct names.
1) The user has never owned an Apple Device in their life. 2) They are trolling super hard.
There are complaints to be had that I definitely agree with, however, I see a TON of fiction for every single legitimate complaint.
No, not an Apple employee, shareholder, etc. (I am broke and dependent on my wife because I am disabled lol)
It sounds like the OP is complaining about Apple when they should be complaining about Peacock.
It would be great if folks would stop assuming this is on me and not Apple. There are Peacock ads in the TV app Home Screen, and they are targeted to One Family and Premier subscribers.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/appletv/comments/1pgyfcx/the_peacoc...
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.
For Shrinking, for instance, they placed an almost full screen, auto play trailer in the main carousel. It is also first in the top ten shows, and it appears in a number of other lists.
Regardless of all this, they do play unrelated promotions for their add ons like some sports stuff or the Peacock deal.
Maybe it’s just me. I’ve been an Apple One subscriber for a long time now. The Peacock commercial I’m talking about plays right when I open the app, almost full screen and quite loud. It seems to be some sort of add-on offer for Apple One subscribers.
Servant was a walking ad for iPhones and Facetime lol
I am glad that they bought the rights to Brandon Sanderson's books, because I know Netflix wouldn't do them justice and Amazon prime would be far worse than that, but it also means that it will have a tenth of the available audience that a Netflix contract would have brought.
It's not like they weren't trying to attract everyone when they were releasing content worth watching. Maybe it's because they didn't have any feedback yet on what works, so they couldn't even try to make safe bets, instead creating a little of everything, with most of it being bland, but a surprising portion being top-tier.
Compare to their much-ballyhooed exercise in lighting money on fire that was their LOTR series.
Calling AppleTV low quality doesn't fit. The rest, yeah. Pretty useless.
It used to be the case that if Apple wanted to build a walled garden / cathedral, then in order to compete in the hardware marketplace they had to provide software that didn't suck. You knew that if you bought an Apple product, there was reasonable assurance that everything was tightly integrated. If it wasn't, you'd go buy a market alternative (Android, PC). In my mind, this means that they spent a lot of time and dev resources (i.e. money) on their Frameworks. I think it showed. Time was spent on design. They focused on opening up capabilities "the right way."
Now that's pointless. If the iPhone is just an Android phone with a different coat of paint, then dev resources are going to be shifted to a place where Apple can distinguish themselves in the market, where they have platforms that they can control: Services.
Your argument essentially boils down to: If Apple doesn't get to do whatever they want without compromise, their execs get too discouraged and depressed to innovate. The obvious conclusion is that the only way we can enjoy the unrivaled genius of Apple is to give them a blank check to do whatever they want.
Every act of consumer protection and every form of pro-competitive regulation is twisted and exaggerated, no matter how insignificant it is to their bottom line or product functionality. The world is ending any time they don't get their way and when the world doesn't end, this decision becomes the scapegoat for all of their future faults, missteps, and bad performance. They can never do anything wrong and nothing is ever their fault, it's so so incredibly tiring to listen to this.
The company as a whole has changed across the board.
At least in North America - their biggest market I think? - the iPhone is still utterly locked down. Far more locked down than, say, their Macs were when OS X was at its best. Meanwhile macOS continues to get more locked down and yet still worse. Your theory just doesn’t match reality.
And getting rid of carrier apps was a positive but it was moving from one walled garden to another.
And that happened a very long time ago. It provides zero defense against accusations of apple changing for the worse.
News+ is the only one of these that has poor quality.
Apple Music is extremely good, and pays artists better than many other platforms like Spotify. Unlike Spotify it isn’t enshittifying the product with AI music, video, and podcast distractions. The software is good quality, native code, not a web wrapper. Plus, there’s a classical music focused version that’s entirely separate.
Fitness+ is a premier product in the space. Have you tried it? The workouts sync with your watch and it has top tier video production quality along with a ton of thought put into accessibility.
Arcade probably does need to have more games added and more attention paid to it, but it’s basically the only place to get mobile games that aren’t stuffed full of gambling mechanics, pay to win, and advertisements.
Apple TV+ is literally the new HBO. They produce some of the most critically acclaimed shows on the planet, and broke the record for number of Emmy nominations by a single studio last year. The software is actually good, which is only really true for TV+ and Netflix. The production values, bitrate, and technology integration (Dolby Atmos/Vision etc) is second to none. MLS coverage by Apple is also top tier, again, with other sports networks regularly broadcasting mediocre quality (bad colors, muddy details, poor on-screen graphics). They’re also getting F1 for US viewers which is almost certainly going to be an improvement over the status quo.
The Play Store Pass? Which not only has games but utilities https://play.google.com/store/pass/getstarted
Yeah, I would say a big ad for a game that is literally THE textbook example of gambling mechanics and dark patterns, followed by 10 other ads for games of the similar genre, is exactly what the previous poster does NOT want from a service like that.
Oh and also from that page there's no telling at all what actual _games_ are included. The only slider on this page that lists anything is for different gambling slop "offers".
That's not even in the same category as Apple Arcade.
One uses a hammer, one uses a microwave, one uses a computer, one uses a word processor. Nothing negative towards the user, they're being productive with the product.
If anything it's derogatory in the other direction, towards the manufacturer, reducing the fruits of their labour to that of a simple tool.
I think the Apple Music service is still good. There are little features that I rely on a lot, like the asterisk next to the prominent/popular songs on a given album.
It's just nuts peoples hatred of ads clouds their vision of this.
Apple News is the most affordable way to access paywalled mainstream news
TV has decent shows
Games has decent games without IAP
Music is decent without ads
Fitness has gotten me in shape at a fraction of the cost of Les Mills or Beach Body
The user interface sucks. Sometimes I go to the actual websites to find articles and then search for them on Apple News. But for $13 USD a month, its a huge bargain and worth the crappy interface.
Another thing that kinda helped me was that Apple News doesn't give you access to the comments sections in these publications. Reading comments in the WSJ was just a huge rage-bait time suck and my life is probably better off not seeing that stuff.
I agree with your point I just find the distinction hard to pinpoint.
It's like the (incorrect) analogy of the boiled frog, I know it's a cliché but I really feel things started downhill in overall quality and wow factor with the advent of Tim Cook.
SJ had failures like Ping and MobileMe, but they seemed to pick up on the criticism back then and execute correctly quickly after.
Now because of the penny-pinching and success of Apple nobody makes a big deal out of anything, the momentum is so strong that stuff like liquid glass can come through unpolished/unfinished/unrefined.
It seems to me that Apple University failed its mission completely.
The culture of excellence is just not there. Big company but not sure if it’s a live player atm. Lots of unrefined experiences.
People say it’s Tim Cook as if Apple had a bunch of CEOs. In its modern incarnation it was basically Jobs and Cook. But there were some major improvements under Cook and some major disappointments. Hardware seems to be doing well, software not so much.
- Him saying "Microsoft has no style", not because I care about ribbing on Microsoft but because it indicated that Apple was a company that really cared about the aesthetics of both their hardware and software products
- His response to the question why there was no $600 MacBook to compete with Windows plastic craptops. He specifically said that to deliver a good UX to the users, he needed Macs at a certain price point to invest in the hardware and the OS. Shareholder value didn't even enter the equation.
He also hated market segmentation and was adamant that all iPhones within a generation had the same features, aside from the storage size. When the 6 Plus models got image stabilization he felt awkward about it.
As soon as Tim Cook took over, it became beancounter city. Market segmentation became massive. Year over year price hikes with minimal improvements. Services became the core strategy. And the last 5 years you are under a constant barrage of ads for iCloud, Apple Music, Apple News, Apple TV and even ads in your Wallet.
Oh, and I'm just remember how Jobs said that form should follow function. Which you can also see a clear decline in from when Jobs became less involved, with iOS 7 being a disaster. And ever since then Apple has being violating their own Human Interface Guidelines. If you download their 1997 version it's absurd how many of their own former guidelines they violate these days.
To be honest, I'm not sure if you can entirely blame Cook. Ever since the 2010s, it's felt like capitalism has reached an endstage culture, where it is no longer about an equilibrium between best product for lowest price vs minimum product for highest price, but instead just maximizing shareholder value at the cost of the customer, the workers, the business itself, the environment and what have you.
did you have a specific example in mind? It seems that the price of the hardware generally stays the same from year to year.
for example, from iphone 3g to iphone 6s was $199. and iphone 12 through today's iphone 17 is $799. I think the change in the middle was due dropping carrier subsidies and going to full-screen with face id.
Since then it's been on a nonstop drive to jam as many subscriptions services into the iOS ecosystem as possible.
After Jobs passed away Tim Cook failed to manage that tension productively and was put in a position where he had to choose between Ive and Forestall. He chose Ive, which in itself was probably the right choice, but there was nobody with Forestall’s clout to temper Ive’s more wanky tendencies.
Much of the other stuff people complain about is kind of just the reality of being a company that sells to millions or tens of millions to being a company that sells to hundreds of millions or close to a billion customers. A lot of the charm and whimsy gets harder to sustain. I’ve long felt that Apple needs to just do a Toyota/Lexus sort of split and have a second nameplate for doing more avante garde, quirky, and lower volume hardware and software projects.
There just wasn’t the demand.
They sort of do this with Beats as a parallel business to their own Apple speakers with products that aim at a totally different market. They need to start doing that with computers too. The entire Mac lineup is designed to be, like, a Honda Accord or Camry. But the Mac Pro is crap, they need a business-line that makes a computing equivalent of a pickup truck but they don’t want to commit.
This hardly an original sentiment, but when Steve Jobs died. Jobs was not perfect, but he believed they were there to make great products, had good taste with obsessive attention to detail, and was pretty much omnipotent in the company. I'm sure there are people with many of these traits in Apple, but not all of them together.
Their first new hardware release was the Apple Watch, which is a confused product, with too many functions on launch, and a poorly thought out two button + scroll wheel + touch screen interface (I still don't really know which button does which). And don't get me started on that ridiculous solid gold version.
You can still see the old Apple in there (look at their hardware!), but it's fragmented and not all pulling in the same direction.
The watch was not only eventually a mega hit, it was an Ive/jobs idea.
Literally everything you are saying is wrong.
I realise that the watch was probably under development for years before Jobs died. It was, however, released in a half baked state – do you remember what the the original use of the lozenge shaped button was, for example? Things being "hits" is not what's under discussion here, Apple has sold a lot of stuff in the Cook era, no doubt about that. Microsoft has had a lot of hits too, doesn't make their products Old-Apple-like!
I don't know how good Ive is without Jobs. His post-Jobs efforts have been pretty mixed. I'd argue Apple's hardware has improved since he left (although, admittedly through playing it safe, especially with the Mac).
Do you think Apple is in decline when it comes to the quality of their products? Because if you don't we're just talking past each-other.
I think you just shot your own argument with that.
I remember when no one thought the Apple Watch would amount to much, and it's literally on everyone's wrist in the US. "Almost one in five US consumers — 17% — say they’ve used an Apple Watch in the past week." -- that's an insane amount of market penetration, when you consider it's all consumers. It's almost rare to see an "analog" watch anymore (I'm one of those). You still have Garmin/Suunto/etc and the luxury analog watches, but they're in a different categories. And Samsung/etc. are far behind.
I've never owned an Apple Watch (I have iPhone/Mac). I prefer the elegance of classical analog watches over having notifications on my wrist (no thanks!). but it's an outstanding product that has driven the sale of iPhones/Macs, etc.
The simple answer would be when SJ passed away. The long answer is there wasn't a turning point, but a long period of cultural shift, due to Tim Cook being CEO.
Tim Cook not immediately taking a CEO stand and left a power vacuum was a mistake. He said himself he thought everything would continue as normal, which obviously did not happen. Firing Scott Forstall was a mistake. Ive taking over software design was a mistake. Not listening to the advice of Katie Cotton and manage a new PR direction was a mistake. Following Phill Schiller advice of firing long time Marketing Firm for Apple was a mistake. Tim Cook not understanding his weakness which is his judgement of character was a big big mistakes, as it leads to Dixon CEO and Burberry CEO taking helms of Apple Retail, ultimately stoping if not reversed the momentum of Apple Retails improvement and expansion by 10 years. Giving Ive the power to play around with Retail Design because Apple Retail Store is somehow a "social place" was a big mistake. Prioritising Operational and Supply Chain Decisions over Design was a mistake after around iPhone 8 Plus. Too focused on sales metric and bottom line was a big mistake. Shifting to Services Revenue, which should have been AppleCare, iCloud or even iPhone Subscription model, instead they got Apple TV+, in my option is a mistake. They were too scared to hurt the relationship with Carriers. Eddy Cue taking over a lot of decisions? Apple going to Davos? Merging of different iOS and macOS team where it used to be teams per product but later became functions per team structure. Trusting China and didn't diversify their production when Trump was first time in Office. ( They said they will but they didn't. Literally every single media lied on behalf of Apple ). I mean the list goes on and on.
I really like someone on HN said about Apple. Ever since Steve Jobs passed away Apple has been left on auto pilot mode for most of its time.
Probably showing my age here, but for me it was the introduction of the iPhone.
Yes, it was a wildly successful product. But it was a product primarily for consuming media (and I will grant taking photos). The iPhone marked Apple's transition from a computer company that focused on computers for creative people to a consumer electronics company.
Certainly a wise choice from a business perspective since there are a whole lot more people consuming things than making them.
But I do miss the old rainbow Apple days when I felt like they really cared about making hardware and software to empower creative people. I still use Macs, and I think they're still the best for creative work, but the company's not the same.
Apple is really messing up in my eyes they have so much potential they are throwing away.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenewsformat
The problem is that people don't use it. I imagine it's a chicken/egg thing, the audience on News isn't big so it isn't worth the publishers time catering to an entirely new format, the News experience is crappy so the audience doesn't grow.
They could have insisted that everyone use their format but I suspect publishers would just refuse. It's not exactly in a publishers interest to help boost a middleman between their content and readers.
I'd be really interested to see what Apple's approach would be if they used more web technologies (since that's what publishers are using today anyway). Even just a webview with disabled JavaScript would get a ton of the way there in terms of performance. They have WebKit engineers in house that could probably tweak it even further.
This is actually the trajectory of both Apple News and iAd before it, which is what started out providing the ad service for Apple News. Apple would like to do a high quality solution, and then keeps relaxing their standards when there's not enough buy-in from the content providers. They were forced to allow the non-curated news formats to have sufficient content.
It'd be a big one-time lift; and of course there'd be annoying constant breakage to fix as sites update; but News.app could always fall back to rendering the original article URL if the News backend service's currently-deployed parser-transformer for a given site failed on the given article. It's make things no worse and often better than they are today.
In this specific example there is a very big difference between producing a format for use in a first-party app vs trying to replace standards for content used across the web.
I mean... sure it could have? There could have been an independent "AMP Foundation" that forked the standard away from Google and owned the evolution of it from then on. Like how SPDY was forked away from Google ownership into HTTP2.
They kept opening it more and more but by then it was too late.
They didn’t need to do like half the work they did, and a lot of what they did do in order to make the news feeds prettier are seldom adopted because Apple doesn’t want to do the hard partnership work to drive and support it.
Except I can’t tell it “I like narrated versions of New Yorker articles”. I can search by publisher, or I can browse narrated stories that are selected “for you” (none of which are of interest to me), but I can’t just search for “narrated stories AND New Yorker”.
And when I do finally find one, if I don’t finish in one session, there is zero context from the previous session when I return to the app—it has forgotten that I ever started listening to the story. I then need to go through the process of finding it again and trying to remember where I left off.
Yet another Apple app designed by idealists and tested and refined by nobody who actually uses the app.
This is worse than using reading news on a browser. Browsers either don’t kill your tabs on its own (desktop browsers) or at least try to remember your scroll position. Even if it fails at doing that, it at least has a history feature. Apple News just makes your half-read articles disappear into the void.
I think I agree. They have a broad selection of apps... that all end up being shallow.
Every once in a while there are decent things hidden though - I like apple translate. I also like adding "copy text from a graphical image" to the OS.
News organizations have really become quite aggressive about negotiating these things now, I think in large part because Meta (aka Facebook at the time) screwed them badly when it stopped revenue sharing.
This leads to a situation where a product that actually could at least be good and serviceable is a mess. They don't see News+ as being a positive to their businesses to bundle it into the subscription.
edit: I'm open to hearing others on this. I am only pointing out both Apple and the publishers are at fault for varying aspects of why Apple News+ ends up being a mediocre product
Any news aggregator platform is only used by news organisations under duress.
However when one such is opened in the browser, it - like any other app link - asks if you want to open it in the news app. And if you close that popup and click on "tap here", you get the link to the original article.
I mostly ignore the "For You" and go straight to browsing the sources I like, "saving" articles to read later, etc.
Never noticed there were lots of ads; I guess I'm used to just scrolling on by them automatically.
Maybe they would have done that anyway though.
If you want to fix ads, make a malicious ad cost the ad network triple the amount they got paid to display it. Corporations are psychopathic by design, if you want to fix them you need to make it an actual financial risk to do something bad.
And then heck, if you want to make stopping the original bad actors more effective, make the platforms pay up those damages but empower them to recover that loss if they can get it from the malicious advertiser.
You'll see platforms doing more vetting of content, doing more KYC, and focused on reducing their own risk.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/05/we-can...
This ought to be a signal that the market is already being served, that it is unlikely to be a big opportunity to make more money.
Even with advertising, what you have in such a market is an all-pay auction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-pay_auction
The end point is nobody makes any profit on apps, because all the money that ought to be profit goes to paying for a bidding war on ad slots.
In fact, more than know, I assumed the only category under discussion were at a minimum nation-scale, what with local knowledge not requiring online advertising as a sign on a building is enough for local neighbourhoods.
Re: being careful
Any system created by humans will be abused unless regulated. And even then, there will always be loopholes which will be abused until punished (and even punishment might not be a proper deterrent if it can be calculated as a cost of business. (Yes I'm arguing for and against you, just thinking out loud basically ;)
edit: grammar
You can just get away with fraud:
Former CEO of Volkswagen AG Charged with Conspiracy and Wire Fraud in Diesel Emissions Scandal
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...
> He remains a fugitive in the United States and is wanted by the Environmental Protection Agency on charges including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act, and multiple counts of wire fraud.
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.
Trying to get a proper grasp of consensus on open forums is hopeless.
When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots. When they don't really know who you are, only bottom feeders bid on the ad slots you see.
In a way, it almost acts as retribution for not submitting to the anti-privacy machine.
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 example, your average techy YouTuber just doing cool geeky stuff, 50% of viewers block ads and <1% become patreon/other paying subs. This comes under some kind of misplaced guise that if everyone blocks ads, geeky YouTuber will work for free.
The Internet needs a level headed reconciliation with "the beast".
I don't think it is the same. There is no manipulation involved here and many people seem to be looking for jobs actively.
> no one actually wants to pay
Two things
1. Most content is actually pretty worthless. It's subsidized by the ad-surveillance industrial complex. Even in the pre-LLM times there is so much blogspam, content farm articles, and slop videos because of this.
2. Payment monopolies have made microtransactions uneconomical through fees, which contributes to the friction of paying. I imagine in an alternate world with a crypto or fiat based digital currency with low enough fees, there would be much more direct payments. Seriously, if you just pay one cent per Youtube video, it'd dwarf the ad income for most channels. Your attention is hilariously worthless.
> Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself.
So be it.
It's like someone realizing that their crack dealer is an untrustworthy scumbag who is destroying everything the care about and they need to totally cut ties with him, and a friend objecting "Unfortunately, the 'scumbag' is your crack supplier himself."
Yeah, we know that. If starving the beast means we have to give up our unhealthy addictions, it's probably a side benefit rather than a counter argument.
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 more fun before youtube became all about profit and people just posted videos for fun, or out of genuine passion. Not having obnoxious youtube ads doesn't even stop creators from getting paid since they can still take donations or sell merch.
What? It's 2026, not 2016? And Patreon has been running very successfully for over a decade? Huh. Whaddayaknow?
1% of people covering most the costs for the other 99% of people is. Which is what we find when looking at patreon conversions
What, you don't have a sub?
While I pay for software, music, movies, etc, I think the vast majority of people either can't or won't. The internet would be vastly different if there were no ads because the amount of content would be greatly reduced.
I still want no ads. I just don't think it'd be as small of a change as you suggest.
In terms of quantity it wouldn't be noticeable to you at all. It'd still be more than you could ever consume in your lifetime. I saw the internet before ads and it was still filled with just about everything you see today. The content itself was actually better in many cases (technical limitations being what they were). It was certainly less harmful.
The only thing I really think we'd have to worry about losing is some of the youtube content made with extremely high production costs but even some of those channels started out producing the same content with lower production values and slowly improved the presentation as their channel grew which could still happen without ads through donations and other strategies.
The vast majority of the content we'd lose on the internet without ads is the stuff companies put out there for no reason other than because they want to make money, as it turns out, that stuff is mostly trash anyway. It's what brought us click bait, entire content farms of trash, the millions of AI generated websites filled with hallucinations that drown out the actual information you're looking for, etc.
Getting rid of ads on the internet wouldn't make all the bad stuff would go away though. Companies already often have other perverse incentives for putting stuff on the internet, but at least we wouldn't be getting the obnoxious ads and surveillance capitalism on top of that.
I mean, want is a strong word, but I'm very much okay with paying creators I follow. I have a patreon account with about 22 subscriptions from 1-50 dollars, because what they create enhances my life.
> For example, your average techy YouTuber just doing cool geeky stuff, 50% of viewers block ads and <1% become patreon/other paying subs. This comes under some kind of misplaced guise that if everyone blocks ads, geeky YouTuber will work for free.
First sentence is correct, the second is patently ridiculous. I don't block ads because I think people should work for free: I block ads because every virus I've ever gotten has been delivered to me via an ad network that's not properly vetting what's being pushed to it, and to save incredible amounts of mobile data, and to prevent my phone from getting (as) hot in my hand.
The creator who's page I'm looking at is not even a factor in this calculus. I don't care. If you put up your stuff and are monetizing via ads only and I bounce off that and you earn nothing, oh well. Put it behind a proper paywall then, just, not my problem boss.
> The Internet needs a level headed reconciliation with "the beast".
The Internet, collectively, has been in an abusive relationship with this beast since it's inception. And yeah we got a bunch of free-at-point-of-use services out of it. Okay? I didn't ask Facebook to exist. I didn't request Twitter, I wasn't simply dying of lack of Linked-In. In fact my life would be better if many of these things closed up shop tomorrow and fucked right off.
In time immemorial, it was normal to host VBulletin forums, your own static website, run a BBS, an ICQ server or TeamSpeak server, or whatever for literally nobody. We had no idea if any damn one was reading what we wrote back then, but we wrote anyway because as most people do in one way or another, we felt the drive to create and to share, and then as the internet evolved and the tools became more successful, we built communities, we built forums, we built email lists, all kinds of decentralized, albiet limited, ways to remain in contact with likeminded people.
It was the monoliths who came onto the scene, stuffed to the gills with VC money, who suddenly gave us Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, all the rest of the websites of which there are like 6 now that everything is on. They showed up, and provided free services in exchange for our data. We didn't ask for that, they gave it freely. And now a couple decades on-ish they're finding out that monetizing user data, which has been the go-to excuse for all that time, doesn't really pay the bills and most of them are either losing money or are selling their souls to anyone who will purchase ad space, which is why ads are basically all scams now.
Ad companies have spent the better part of my life digging their own graves and I'm very excited to watch them lay down in them. Rest in piss. The Internet lived before the Platforms, and it will survive them.
Usually a few enthusiasts can just bear the lion's share of the cost to create the infrastructure for a community, excess can go to long term contingency funding and, in the unfortunate case that a community completely runs out of funds then it'll stop existing until people care enough to create a new one.
Video hosting and the like are dramatically more expensive but they can be reasonably subscription based (see Nebula and Dropout[2] neither of which have the VC backing to light piles of money on fire just to sustain a user base) but not everything needs such a high level of technology.
Heck, back in the day the majority of traffic that a website that was ad-driven needed to host was the ads - if you were half-decent at writing asset caching rules images became a non-issue that were usually handled by proxies/other intermediaries.
Everything costs money - but it's important to remember that a lot of services charge a lot more money than they cost to run and that ad money is a lot less money than most people realize[1].
1. A big exception to this being things like newspapers which really are in a hard place. Their expense isn't in hosting or other technical doodads (e.g. the NYT Crossword puzzle) - the subscription you're paying is to afford the huge team of reporters and editors that are needed to produce the information gathering and presentation.
2. Edited to add - Dropout is probably a terrible example here since it's a lot more like a newspaper, only a sliver of the cost is technical, most of it goes to the production team and talent they're retaining. But I'll leave it in there unedited.
You mentioned the NYT in particular — they're paid a lot to shill political positions.
No. As discussed in (Epstein friend, but the research is still sound) Noam Chomsky's work, the money comes from access. The positions taken are to gain access (they don't take positions that will cause them to lose access).
Paid to report something? You sound like a conspiracist. The real conspiracy is how the system is aligned to generate the outcome. That's capitalism.
Money and power serves money and power.
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.
Unrelated: Once upon a time it was believed ads should pair with content, not with users. It's been proven to still be more effective. Problem (for advertisers) is reach vs. cost of producing ads that content-align. In any case, Apple has enough reach they could easily bring ad sales in-house. Plenty TV shows, the show owner retains rights to ad slots partly to ensure no brand damage to show and partly to make more money per slot.
They have not been very successful in their goals. I suspect, without sarcasm, that that is because compared to the absolutely routine click-fraud conducted up and down the entire ad space at every level, those plugin's effects literally didn't even register. It's an arms race and people trying to use ad blockers to not just block the ads but corrupt them are coming armed with a pea shooter to an artillery fight, not because they are not very clever themselves but just without a lot of users they can't even get the needle to twitch.
Never allow ads in your life. They're malicious in every way.
Because what matters is the total spend per resulting purchase, not spend per impression.
Because spam ad companies have a very tiny conversion rate, they can only pay a very small amount per impression before it becomes unprofitable.
Legitimate companies aren't usually trying to completely trick their customers. They are selling an actual halfway decent or good quality product. Therefore, if they are targeting well, they have a much much higher conversion rate and can therefore pay much more per impression.
Even with the most straightforward to compare products like bank accounts, the biggest household names absolutely screw their customers. e.g. Chase gives like 0.01% APY on their savings accounts, or 0.02% on their "premier savings accounts". Capital One just settled a lawsuit for having two almost completely identical "high yield" accounts where the only difference was the less informed set of customers got like 0.3% in their "high yield" account while everyone else including Capital One's other, otherwise identical account was giving over 4%. It's not quite fraud, but I'd call that a scam from a major company. Part of the lawsuit alleged that they excluded existing customers with the worse account from ad campaigns about the better one. You can't do that without profiles on everyone, and that's exactly the sort of thing where even for products from the same company, they will absolutely use information about you to advertise to you the worst deal they think you'll take.
Regardless, imagining there were a difference in the direction you believe, it would be one of degree, not kind. Scams by large companies backed by large advertising campaigns are still scams.
You seem to be trying to push some ideological idea that all ads/companies are equally scammy, but that's obviously not true.
On top of that, most ads provide no value whatsoever. Take the classic Coca-Cola vs Pepsi: they are fishing from the same pool so ads are primarily going to steal customers away from the other brand. Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing, so the ads are a net negative for society.
There is also of course advertising in order to inform your potential market that your product exists at all. But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already? And if two products seem to have the same features for the same price, the one which isn't heavily advertised is probably the better choice: it is likely already more popular for a reason, and there's a decent possibility that the money they aren't spending on advertising is going towards useful things like quality and customer support.
I completely understand why companies in a heavily capitalist society are spending money on ads, but you can't convince me that the world wouldn't be a more pleasant place without them.
> Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing
This is an assumption not backed by data. But its pretty much impossible to truly test this hypothesis at any real scale. What data we do have is if many brands stop advertising when they used to do advertising, they tend to start to lose sales. But, as you point out, their competitors didn't necessarily reduce advertising as well, its not testing "what if everyone cut advertising".
> But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already?
Its an assumption these people would have even found the product in the first place, or were willing to give it a try, or even know the product category or type exists in the first place, and that this organic growth would have happened fast enough to keep the product alive. If everyone is basing their decisions off word of mouth, are there really going to be enough people in your network to buck the trend and give a scrappy new competitor a go and have their opinion make decent enough waves?
A world without any advertising at all seems to me to be a place where entrenched names in markets end up dominating based purely on people practically never finding the competitors. They become the default, the go to. This still largely happens in this over-marketed world today though, I do agree, but I think that's more of over-consolidation of producers and distributors having an outsized say on what we see in a lot of physical stores.
That world without any advertising also leads to some things not being made that would have otherwise existed, things that people generally like. Lots of magazines and other publications practically live off some amount of marketing, and they largely exist as a format for people to go see what's happening in a given industry. Lots of things like sports leagues/teams rely on sponsorships. Would there be Formula 1 racing if they didn't have those corporate sponsors?
I do agree especially internet advertising is largely destroying the internet. I don't understand how anyone uses mobile web pages without an ad blocker these days. Its absolutely terrible looking at anyone else's phones that doesn't block the ads, every page is more ad than content. We've definitely gone too far.
Maybe you are right in most cases and I was the victim of a fluke.
But from what I have seen from Google after that I don't think so.
Facebook however, a company I disliked then and dislike now are scary good with their ads and have often been even even when I actively tried to avoid them.
All this to say that your theory sounds interesting but I am convinced it is far from the whole story.
I have looked what interests for example Google stores about me
> http://google.com/ads/preferences
I am very certain that these don't describe me well, or I am classified wrong in some categories (without using any tracking/privacy protection! But I won't actively correct this misclassification).
My experience is rather that some people have very niche interests (among hacker-minded people, the proportion of these people is in my experience much higher than in the general population), and are hard to target using ads, so advertising networks and companies don't make the effort to target these users.
Also, when I google about prices for some product category, I often have other reasons than a buying wish. For example I recently googled about the prices of products in some category because some work colleague claimed that someone else bought a product of a specific vendor for a specific price, but I really felt that the claimed price was off; to substantiate my claims, I did some googling.
Or I google about products in a specific category because I am exactly not satisfied with what some established players that love to advertise have to offer.
What I mean to say is that there is a type of person that will never click on an ad, even if they want to buy the product. Worse yet, most of the time I do click on an ad, it's a misclick.
But I don't see this as a failure of the ad industry. I just think I'm the edge case.
But almost everyone thinks the same as you do, and yet ads are huge business. How are you affected? I don't know, but my first guess is brand perception, regardless of your self-diagnosis. If a company is advertising a certain time-limited sale, some of their value will come from conversions taking that offer. But some, maybe most, is the brand impression that people get over time. Think "I never heard of that" vs "Oh yeah, I've seen that somewhere".
I'm not saying that I'm immune to ads. What I'm saying is that my "ad profile" probably only says what sort of content I consume, if anything at all. Ironically, since I barely consume gaming-related content these days, I assume there is no way for ad companies to figure out that's the one thing I would actually buy from an ad.
Instead they show me ads for things I would never spend a cent on, like Decentraland, just because I've watched some tech videos.
I don't know if your assumptions are right or not.
Last time I asked someone that (over a decade ago), the answer I got was that ad companies wouldn't spend millions of dollars on their ad campaigns if they didn't have proof of effectiveness. Sure, okay, that's good evidence that the ad campaigns are effective at getting some people to buy the product. But what's the evidence that I, personally, am influenced by ads? Rather than "many people are influenced by ads, don't think you're immune"?
Especially because I, personally, actively avoid advertising. I block it on the Internet, I avoid watching live TV and instead buy (or check out from the library) DVDs of shows I'm interested in... And the billboards on the highway are mostly for services I don't need (like injury lawyers) so I have almost never bought something because I saw it advertised on a billboard. The only exceptions are the ones where the billboard said "(name of restaurant) 10 miles ahead" and I thought "Oh good, I had been hoping to find exactly that restaurant, I'll pull over in 10 miles". But I was already looking for that product, the billboard ad just helped me find it.
Not to mention that if all ads were like that — "Hey, our restaurant is at exit 183, we do really good fajitas" — I would be far, FAR less annoyed by advertising. If that was the only kind of ads you saw on the Internet, I might not have sought out adblockers in the first place.
that is what ad-infested society does to everyone… everything you end up spending money on you sure think you were going to already :) you sound here exactly like my wife does when she gets pulled in bu an ad - “oh we really needed new curtains and these just came across the billboard, the ones we have are like 7 weeks old…”
Edit: I mean, yes, some people do think they came up with the idea that was just suggested to them. Stage magicians have used suggestion tricks for years. But part of my point is that billboards that simply remind you that a product exist, and your own preexisting desires then make you want to buy it, are the form of advertising I am least annoyed by. Even people susceptible to ads had some kind of preexisting desire for the product (I really don't like those curtains, I know we only bought them two months ago but I'm having buyer's remorse, I want something else, oh look, curtains on sale!) or else the ad wouldn't work. I mean, if I know I don't have psoriasis then I won't care about psoriasis medication ads in the slightest. But if I suspect I have psoriasis (maybe I do have it, or maybe I'm a hypochondriac) then the ads will actually have a chance of influencing me.
Thing is, as far as I myself am concerned, I'm a pretty content guy. What I want is more good books to read, more good open-source software to be created, and to be able to enjoy time with my wife and kids. Almost none of which are desires that will make me susceptible to most ads. (Though if the ad was "Hey, Lois Bujold has a new book series out!" then yes, I'd be susceptible to that ad. But again, pre-existing desire: Bujold has only written two books out of her entire oeuvre that I've disliked. A much higher like-to-dislike ratio than most authors).
Your followup example of this is an impulse buy that happened adjacent to ad exposure. For that particular confluence, your theory could bear out.
But I'm not sure folks do that with any regularity. And for folks who rarely impulse buy or don't see/hear ads in spaces they control - I don't think they run into it.
Since then I gave up. I tried everything which was reasonable, even some unreasonable. Yet, I couldn’t stop them not knowing. Maybe if I had blocked JavaScript completely, maybe, but I’m not sure at all anymore.
Don't give up! Even if failure to prevent some data collection is inevitable, we can all help reduce the aggregate value of shadow profiles assembled by advertisers:
Block all ads. The bits that cross the threshold onto your networks and devices are yours to display or not. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a petty tyrant.
Help friends and family to block all ads. React to ads in their homes and on their devices the way you would to nonconsensual, graphic, violent pornography.
Keep blocking ads and tracking even though you know shadow profiles built about you continue to exist. It's only partially about confounding surveillance. It's also, and equally, about changing culture.
I recently learned that if you turn on ad targeting you can block certain ads and never see them again. So I’ve turned it on just to block the worst of the ads. But googles ad targeting still can’t target ads to me. It’s maybe only 70% scams now. But their targeting still sucks and I still get ads in foreign languages that I do not speak.
On my desktop I just use Adblock. I really try to avoid YouTube on mobile at all costs because the ads make it completely unusable.
Let’s also not pretend that personalised advertising is that great. Our Tizen runs the crappiest ads (can’t opt out in some cases). And I just have to take a look at my partner’s phone to see what personalised means, and which advertisers can _afford_ to get placement. (No, she doesn’t need another of the last 10 things we’ve purchased.)
All the fine print, exceptions, limited dates, etc. often hidden from you as best they can makes it scam-like.
Part of the problem as far as I can see is that there is no way to mark an add as insultingly matched.
Is there a link that confirms what you said here? There were "click the monkey to win an ipod" scam ads before we had ad-blockers. I think scams have always been around. I do want to update my mental model if I'm out of touch from what people actually see.
But no. I could argue that hypothetically scammers would know exactly what I would fall for, but I have real evidence: Facebook knows everything about me and serves me mostly scams, since ever. My Google ads (mostly in Youtube) actually became less scammy when I opted out of all targeting that I could find (went from crypto scams and 5G protection to car commercials and big brands reminding me they exist).
// Adblock at DNS used to kill these Apple News ads. They're no longer suppressed. Free with their Plus all the things and aggregated my content subs but I quit using it. Had loved Texture, this now sucks.
Emphasis on maybe. HN is large enough that scammers will try to slip in. The moderation mechanisms probably catch a lot of it but not all.
My trust in anything online or in an app is very low and must be earned.
Especially on this site I would be very careful with trusting any recommendations. Probably more often than not it's the product/service of the person talking about it, so basically an ad.
I don’t have a TV, don’t listen to the radio or read newspapers or magazines. I live in a small town with no metro, no billboards. I buy things I need like milk and vegetables, I don’t buy things that require ads for me to know about.
I Adblock the web aggressively.
Any sufficiently trusted (online) community will find many attempts to exploit its trust for profit.
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.
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.
Things break or transfer ownership. HN accounts are quick to make, and I’m not one to collect internet points.
Even if the ads are heavily personalized, the advertiser is still the one who is trying to push an idea onto you. Similarly, even if your social media account has a lot of personal information on you, the provider is still the one who is selecting which content will appear in you "feed".
I believe that these practices make people less self-aware of what they actually want. Because they mostly respond to suggestions. They do much less research into what is possible. They just say yes or no to the things they see in their ads or in their "feed". While becoming more and more distant from the reality that is happening outside the provider-managed ads or "feeds".
I think that a safe way out of this is to ignore ads and "feeds" completely. And actively search for the things or content you want. Curate your interests in a way you like. Not in a way advertisers or providers want.
I remember back in 2010 I had to wait a week and correct my ad before it was approved and now they basically stream all kinds of scams without checking. They do have quite a few people, they could build a better scam detection system but it's against their interests.
I think there's something to be said for how IG and TikTok ads are actually made that makes them more appealing which is that they actually try to be worthwhile content to watch in a way banner ads and TV commercials just aren't.
My honest take on it is that it's the payment companies that are complacent here - they're just allowing payment processing for anyone now up to a certain amount before doing proper diligence. The fact these chinese vendors can spin up a website, get payment processing, verify an ads account and buy advertising shows that many compliance functions are being skipped (or are complicit) in this.
It works because everyone in the game has something to gain from it - Apple's contract likely puts verification on Taboola's plate, which is likely not being done per their own "controls" process, or is itself being automated (poorly). Taboola is getting paid because they're running these ads and charging for them, the vendors are being paid because they're drop shipping temu garbage that doesn't resemble their AI ads (since taboola isn't checking this at all) and getting away with it for a few months by long shipping times and delaying refunds/chargebacks long enough to get paid, and the payment processors (paypal, apple pay, google pay) are all making money on their obscene 1%+ processing markups, and have special "group" programs where a company can underwrite their own merchants provided they follow guidelines (compliance offloading). Visa/Mastercard are offloading their compliance duties to the payment processors until they get a formal complaint or chargeback/refund spike over a certain ratio (where they issue a fine and seize processing volume - which is also income for them).
btw if you want to be 100% sure something is a scam - check the iframe url on the credit card input form on the checkout page - on mustylevo.com its https://cashiers.myshopline.com/pci-sdk/v3/iframe.html?merch... which is hardly a name brand ecom platform - they have a "shopify-like" checkout but that isn't shopify (props to shopify/shop pay - they've been very quick to kill these kind of scams on their platform despite it losing them some fees).
So yeah - everyone involved in this is making money and is complicit through their lack of process.
It's reminiscent of triangulation fraud in that regard. The incentive is for everyone involved to keep their mouths shut because you buy something for below-market prices on sites like eBay, the "seller" places orders using stolen credit and debit cards with legitimate retailers, and the product ships directly to you. Everyone wins...as long as the account holder doesn't pay attention to their statements.
Hold the ad companies responsible. They are the most complicit.
The last thing we need right now is some political party declaring their opponents a scam and turning off their donations. Not that I'm a fan of political donations, its just that I'm even more troubled by policies that would give an edge to incumbents.
The biggest problem started when Apple accepted Taboola as an advertising partner. Taboola is the master of the chumbox/chumvertising, and it's unsurprising that ads are full of scams, that is Taboola's raison d'etre. See https://medium.com/the-awl/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-c... from 10 years ago. This isn't new.
It’s hard to explain but it is like some subconscious filtering that occurs on a preRecognise hook or something. Weird.
I feel the same though. My only complaint when Adblockers fail is that I have to scroll so much to read some articles on some sites. Sure, there may be some level of subconscious registration occurring in my brain for maybe the company logo, but it’s usually minimal.
I curled the page and piped it to a markdown conversion tool because I really wanted whatever information I'd searched. It's the first time I ever didn't just close the tab and move on because whatever I'd searched was a pressing issue that I wanted to solve.
What a fucking dick move by that site. Fuck them, whoever they were.
I’ve also trained myself to recognize and not consume ads anywhere they are not blocked.
Sorta the same as the emails that went out to employees of my org telling them that we would perform network upgrades that resulted in IP addresses changing. Not one person that I've assisted updating their devices read those emails because they were mentally filtered out as noise. We sent a lot of notices, fwiw.
I can't imagine what it's like to access modern websites unfiltered.
I left my iPad deliberately unfiltered to discourage browsing - it's a bedroom device - and it's ridiculously effective. I see a cookie banner with the "legitimate interest" nonsense and I give up.
I can't believe how normalized this stuff is. It's loud. It's incredibly stupid. It treats the viewer as unintelligent. It's really offensive if you aren't used to it.
I do sometimes find I'm accidentally clicking on the ads at the top of search engine results, though for this case it's extra ironic as the ad is for the real thing I'm searching for which is 2 results further down the list, and I only realise I clicked on an ad when the link goes via an ad-tracking domain that I block.
I've recently been fooled by an ad in reddit that was pretending to be news, which took me to a fake BBC website. First hint, I also block the BBC domain (nothing wrong with them, it's just a habit I want to get out of given I don't live in the UK any more).
Even for propaganda, I am constantly made aware of my propaganda immunity being subpar for all different kinds of propaganda. Often it's just subtle seeds of propaganda that impact the choice of words that I use to be something different than what I really believe in, and sometimes it is more serious and deeper cases of propagandisation. Very unfortunate, but each time it shows me why I should be critical of everything that I read online.
I assume this comes down to some sort of distribution agreement, but, as bad as the ads are, this single behavior is the reason I stopped using Apple News and continue searching for a successor.
I attempted to find a stocks app replacement but nothing else has such a slick interface and wasn’t also crammed full of ads.
Do not buy this!! [1] https://kenmiso.com/products/%E2%9A%A1%E2%9C%A8ultimate-v8-e...
Not trying to make your situation worse, I just find it interesting what these sites are able to get away with to get people to part with their money.
That reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy%27s_Chocolate_Experience
...which ironically has crossed the line into "so bad it's good" territory.
https://i0.wp.com/kirkville.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/I...
https://img-va.myshopline.com/image/store/1731468034215/1dd4...
OwO
I mean how could you not want to own a piece of hand-painte perfectly restody that perfectly restores the V8 engine red?
That mug is amusing but it should't be too hard for China to make something similar - but real (at least without the weird piston).
Somehow, he or she was still convinced and put it up.
I would imagine it might be the same with those ads.
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.
It could be sloppiness, but I think scammers just organically copied efforts that worked, and those were the ones with poor presentations because they pre-filter and so target the scammers efforts more efficiently. The scammers need not be aware of why it works.
It is intentional. People who will not notice, are the least likely to complain later.
Do you know why all these “Nigerian prince” emails are of a very specific style?
What's more, if you even touch them while scrolling, it triggers the "download app" screen, even if I don't explicitly tap. This is new as of a few weeks ago.
But management by metrics means line go up? All is good.
I subscribed to Apple One for a period of time and tried to use News+. Even when paying, it seems like most of the article were behind a paywall. That, plus the ads, I didn’t understand what I was paying for. I can have a much better user experience with RSS.
That's hardly a reason to stick with News+, but it's already in my bundle.
Also, I probably split my non-tech news time between News+, the NYT App, and Reeder (I'm in the process of moving more to RSS).
The first few times the App Store opened to TurboTax while scrolling past, I assumed it was my fault and I was somehow misclicking. Then I slowed down and confirmed, no, this is the intended behavior. It’s meant to pop up and disturb your reading.
What slimy behavior. And the fact that it’s TurboTax of all companies they’re doing it for is just salt on the wound.
Try it: when it tells you a story isn’t available without a subscription, search the headline and often the story can be read on its original source, for free.
Which is why I block ads unconditionally everywhere that I can.
Heck, I've even seen scam ads in printed local newspapers. They typically target seniors with a thing for collecting rare coins and use misleading language about the U.S. Mint.
I clicked on the daring fireball link and immediately saw an intrusive ad.
They are just everywhere, the web was never like this in the beginning.
A complete scourge.
Maybe briefly. I've been on the web since the late 90s and horrible banner ads (and for a while, shudder, flash ads) have been a thing for as long as I can remember. At least now we have good content blockers!
Or rather, if you believe you are too poor to afford a $10 a month subscription you probably believe you're too poor to afford anything that is advertised. The model of "premium subscription with no ads" flies in the face of reality.
Advertising is speech and it used to be that if a magazine/newspaper printed a scam ad, it was horribly damaging to their business, both legally and morally.
I think YouTube has no idea that when I see 70% ads for things that are transparently scams, the other 30% of advertisers are being scammed too because I'm going to assume that they are all scams. Meta has been busted for putting it in writing that they could do something about scam ads but won't because it would cost them revenue in the short term.
They need to be made to care, somehow.
why, though?
It's the state of the industry that is bad.
Some of them are funded by scamming others, crypto, VC, etc. Even the first link in the article [0] has a VC backed startup advertising (they paid $11K!) that nobody asked for.
There is no such thing as an ethical ad whatsoever.
[0] https://daringfireball.net/2024/07/apple_taboola_sitting_in_...
Steve Jobs always said he wanted to make insanely great products for customers. Products they’d be proud to recommend to their family. It feels like Cook lost his way, spending too much time focusing on the stock, instead of letting great products drive adoption, and letting the stock follow.
If the rumors are true that Apple is preparing for a change at the top, I how we see a dramatic change in the services strategy and Apple can get back to making great products that people actually want to use.
Since last year, I've been reporting every gambling ad as "Promoting illegal product/service" (they are, in fact, illegal here) to no avail, there's no end to these ads nor seems like YouTube is willing to do anything but implement dark patterns to discourage reporting, such as delayed pop-ups when reporting to interrupt typing.
I noticed some time ago that others ads that seemed not related to gambling were also leading to gambling apps. They are categorized as anything, like Hotels, Banking, Cullinary and Education. Don't look like YouTube checks if the things being advertised are really what they claim to be. It's worse when you remember that kids also use YouTube a lot.
I guess that was at the same time the low point of marketing and also its most honest stage.
Whether they say it explicitly or not, that's what they push through careful imagery and wording.
The online adverting industry is raking in billions on scamming people, while providing questionable value for actual good brands. Even if your company is honest and makes good products, you're competing with the scammers for ad space and that pushes up your cost.
I've said this on multiple occasions, but I do not believe that the honest companies are able to fund the tech industry in it's current form. Meta, Google, Apple and everyone else, expects increasing revenue, year on year, most of which is suppose to be delivered by ads, bought by other companies. Those companies just aren't see the same level of growth, nor do they see enough value from ads to increase their advertising. So the big websites take in more and more questionable ads to pad their numbers. So what if consumers get scammed? They should have been more critical.
It's the very rare advert that speaks to you, and informs you, and simply makes you aware of its existence without the ridiculous, oversized, plastic cherry on top.
On the other hand, the ads are usually static, the content on the page will stay put (unlike news sites on the regular web, where the paragraph I am reading will shift up or down and often will get completely jettisoned out of the viewport), there are no pop-ups, and the page has never scrolled back up to the top while I was already half-way down the article.
That's not what these sites do. They are dropshipping sites. Make up a random expensive price and then say it is on sale at a price where you still make profit. Some make the shipping more expensive so they advertised price of the item is even lower or even free.
Taboola is a scammers paradise and I'm surprised Apple touched them with a 10 foot pole even.
A lot of scams and cons are deliberately stupid looking and absurd to pre-select for gullible marks.
It’s also why goofy conspiritainment shows are loaded with ads for quack medicines. Anyone who thinks we didn’t go to the moon will probably buy herbal dick pills.
I suppose that, ironically, well-intentioned doctors would indeed prefer that people not know about these "tricks" and other medical scams.
I have seen a bunch of these. It is a wildly subtle way to get referral points. As the AI part is making it supper easy to mill these things out.
The most wild one I have seen is the 'ai scott adams'. The tone is in the right ballpark. Still a little odd but looking better after their first few attempts. I expect soon it will drop random adverts here and there. With the long con being getting people to watch it, then farm them.
all ads are scams, in the sense that all cops are bastards - not so much that every individual cop is a bastard, more that the institution of advertising enshrines, encourages, and rewards scamming its audience. Do honest ads exist? Sure - but since you’ll never know which is which, you’re better off avoiding them as a rule, the risk is not worth the reward.
Is it possible to change the institution of policing, such that the bastards will be punished and excluded and removed as a general consideration? It’s possible, yes, but there are so many dollars tied up in the advertising industry that it’s pretty hard to imagine.
There was an extremely funny and interesting Canadaland podcast about these, wherein Canadaland's founder Jesse Brown bought an "elegant men's cardigan" from a fake Toronto clothing store that was "going out of business" due to its ersatz owners’ retirement.
https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/1176-mens-elegant-cardiga...
ChatGPT: (sponsored) Buy this cute mug in the shape of a purse with AI created pictures of a dog! Just $19.99 (at 80% discount)
If demand for advertising drops too low as a whole, and ad supported content goes away as a result, is there enough of the internet left to maintain critical mass and keep existing?
Maybe spam really does win in the end.
The truth is most people that say they're actively ignoring it are still getting affected.
> These fake “going out of business ads” have been around for a few years, and even the US Better Business Bureau warns about them, as they take peoples’ money then shut down.
Shouldn’t facilitating such scams be illegal? Cracking down on media companies like Apple who serve scams might be a bridge too far, but why not go after a scam aggregator like Taboola?
It is an awful lot of power to give these companies to decide how we use their devices to interact with the world _and_ how we view the world.
I don't want anyone curating the current events or long-form I read. I want to see the whole buffet and choose myself, even sampling the unsavory ones from time-to-time to keep myself in check.
As a longtime Mac nerd, this makes the ads story even worse than it already was. See this [0] (unrelated to me) article on the ways that Cook's focus on the stock has caused rot for a good summation of how software / services are tanking at Apple.
All plugged-in Apple nerds have been aware of the decline. It's finally reached an apex where it's getting a lot of blog posts. I really hope they're noticing (I think they are - John Gruber wasn't granted a live interview after criticizing their AI efforts last year), but I don't expect them to act rationally in response).
As a decades-long Apple nerd who feared the company would collapse in the 90s, it's fucking horrid.
0. The Fallen Apple - https://mattgemmell.scot/the-fallen-apple/
Ads on social media, youtube, everywhere seem to be a high % of scams, or weirdly creepy type health products, or creepily manipulative (and ironic) content like "if you're not using my 5 strategies then you're being manipulated".
What is most odd is that I wouldn't mind ads that were for things I want, but nobody seems interested in that angle, they want to just impose their stuff on me.
can just anyone create an ad for anything anywhere? is there no sort of filter on being a legitimate business, protected classes, target demographics, etc?
If anybody pushes anything down your throat, that's the thing you DON'T need. As simple as that. If you need something, you'll find it yourself.
title.replace(/(i now assume that |on apple news )/ig, '')That's either incompetence or betrayal of trust. In both cases, the only solution is to be careful, boycott and press charges when something is illegal.
Install this app that lets you fake wash cars and all sorts of things! (Instead of actually taking care of something).
Install Temu, shop like a millionaire (who gives a F about the planet! Just buys clothes you don’t even have to wash, just throw them away!)
Oh you’ve searched for Microsoft Authenticator? Here have some scam app that has been downloaded 541 times!
Steve would turn around in his grave, and I? I have lost all respect for this once great company and hope I never succumb to such temptation if my company gets successful.
News is a scam. It’s called propaganda. We knew this for a long time.
To me the whole premise always seemed ridiculously fishy. Why would a retiring artisan commission a Youtube ad campaign, of all things?
There were leatherworkers, tailors, shoe makers, or as below jewellers/goldsmiths
https://old.reddit.com/r/Polska/comments/1ltpt35 - from 7 months ago, this one also comes with a fake review from "Żuromin A." - which isn't even a male name but the name of a small village in northern Masovian voivodeship
More to that - many of the ads today aren't even scams. They merely exist as a deliberate source of annoyance to compel the person to pay for an ad-free premium version, like 90s era "nag screens" on shareware.
Times when ads could give a legit business any positive conversion, are long gone.
People use to say "I feel safe giving an iPhone to grandma because the wallet garden protects her".
Well that argument falls short when Apple allows Taboola of all scam ad networks the be present in their news app.
Or when app store search results is filled with misleading ads.
Use other platforms. Don't use Apple News. You could use an AI chatbot to find news for you. It has no ads, much easier to read, totally free, and tailored to your instructions.
Apple using Taboola is so hysterical because of their claim to focus on user experience. Taboola ads are a chumbox of the absolute worst bullshit ads on the market. The only thing worse is the zergnet stuff.
For people who dropped this, was there something better you switched to?
I own multiple personal Mac computers, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, iPad Pro, a few HomePods, and a few Apple TV devices. I’ve already proven that I’m willing to pay for a product even when there are cheaper alternatives. Why they decided to make News a paid subscription with ads — especially low-quality ads is beyond me.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve deleted the News, Stocks, and Weather apps, and will just remove any additional apps they decide to chuck in. It’s a real shame their aggressive pursuit of services revenue is destroying what is a great hardware ecosystem.
I don’t see ads on the weather app (at least on my phone)
Those two words definitely don't belong together.
I truly don't believe that there is enough legitimate advertisers willing to buy ad space in Apple News (or elsewhere) to generate to profit Apple expects.
Scams, you see, make more profit per customer, and thus can afford to spend more on ads per customer. This creates an upward pressure on ad prices, on top of the extra ads sold.
This is why abuse prevention at major ad platforms is so consistently lackluster. They want to stop some scams, the most obvious and and the most illegal kind, so that they can say they tried - including to regulators, and to major companies that also buy ads from them and don't want their ads next to penis enlargement pills. But actually stopping all fraud and scams could cut into their profits in a meaningful way. So there's no hurry to build better ad quality control systems, not at all. Actively staying on top of ad fraud is paying more money to make less money.
Facebook is a major example of this kind of dynamic in action. They actually had internal estimates of how much it would cut their revenue to get rid of the majority of fraud, and were silly enough to put them in the writing.
-- Tim "Apple" Cook (paraphrased)
Actual quote from a few days ago:
> “Services also achieved an all-time revenue record, up 14 percent from a year ago [...] a testament to incredible customer satisfaction for the very best products and services in the world.”
That's because they know that in Apple News+ you are the product and their profit lowers if you block their ads by disabling the app.
And does it block ads on Apple News?
To block ads on Apple News you need to block iadsdk.apple.com in DNS. E.g., NextDNS
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.
And doubtless many of them use intentionally use TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc, where "influencers" subtly (or not-so subtly) advertise to them in the native format of the platform.
I open it semi-regularly with some naive hope that it won't be garbage.
Especially with the failed Apple Intelligence that they will now have to pay their way out of.
My thinkpad is from 2017, but I bought it in 2022, it's still working fine - I upgraded the memory to 32G (£70) and I've replaced the battery twice (once when I bought it, once a couple of months ago). When I replace it it will likely be because of hardware failure (droppping it etc).
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, lightweight and powerful.
Here is the TG review/verdict: https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/samsung-galaxy-b...
Don't get any gaming laptop. Some of them are truly bottom of the barrel slop and it really matters that you do your research. (See, for instance, NuclearNotebook reviews on YouTube)
But for decades, I have found that gaming laptops (decent brands and popular models) gave best bang for buck, especially with AMD hardware. My 12+ years old Lenovo gaming laptop is still going strong, and my 15+ years old Sony Viao netbook is also doing well (with SATA SSD and RAM upgrades few years ago).
But yeah, read/check up on the reviews (from reputed reviewers) before splurging for an expensive laptop.
One nifty trick to identify VFM(value for money) laptops is to check Amazon site/app for "Smartchoice" laptops. It is a special keyword that Amazon adds to listings of popular laptops that are VFM (best deals) and having good reviews.
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
CachyOS on a 200-300 USD Intel n100 tablet with a wired or wireless keyboard of your choice is my go-to recommendation these days. I have one connected to a 4k display and it handles 4k YouTube just fine. It handles Windsurf as well. By comparison, Debian 13 could not handle 4k video and Windsurf overtaxed the system, causing write access errors.
https://www.chuwi.com/product/items/Chuwi-hi10-x2.html
Or spend a little more to get a 12 inch higher resolution display: https://www.chuwi.com/product/items/chuwi-hi10-max-n150.html
If you need more video outputs, higher speed I/O, or a faster CPU for video editing, I cannot help you.
Some things are not scams but I will never hear about them.
100% shit
have u ever been to truth social? it's the most user-hostile experience since the days of limewire and bonzai buddy - https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. Ads are capitalist tools to get you to buy things, but in most cases, you get the thing you buy. I'm into photography, books, and music, for example, and the ads I see for cameras aren't scams, nor are ads for books or records. Some of them may attempt to to manipulate you to part with your money, but this sort of scam is different.
One problem with Apple News on the iPad or Mac is the size of the ads. Yes, I notice them and generally scroll past them, but they are huge and obtrusive. I've been noticing these obvious AI ads for a couple of months; especially the one with the mug or the totebags. But they have become endemic recently.
Someone I know said that he assumes all ads on Instagram are scams. I don't use IG, but I do use Facebook to keep up with local groups. There was a period where there were tons of those "going out of business ads," and I reported many of them. But I'd say about half the ads I see now are brands I know. Presumably, since IG uses the same algorithm and personal data, my experience there would be the same.
I think the problem with Apple News is that it's not widely used, and advertisers don't see it as a good place to spend their money. Since Apple started using Taboola, it's pure enshittification.
It's worth noting that in Apple's earnings call last year, they said that their profit margin on services was 78%. While Apple News probably doesn't account for much in that number, it seems like much of the company, as far as services are concerned, is aiming for cash over quality.
Also there is the converse proposition that: "all clicks are click fraud", that is, many web sites try to trick you into clicking on ads by making pop-ups that are hard to close, by making the layout shift so you click on an ad when you were trying to click a link, etc.
Most of the time, when people realize something, it happens NOW. Also, AI isn't even mentioned in the headline at all, and not even in the first part of the article. It's just used as one hint that it might be scam, then followed up with further evidence.
What? Yes, of course. Are you so terminally online that you assume all advertising is the fake AI chum that we see on the web?
What I don't understand is why high-value brands sell their screen estate to straight up scams or low quality ads.
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.
Now ads are just scams
I'll load up Facebook right now and get the same things. Google? The same.
And to no surprise, ads like these break Apple's ad content guidelines[1].
OP should figuratively put down the video camera and go perform CPR. Report the Ad. Make the internet a better place.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/adguide/apd527d891a8/1...