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Local and major news sites alike, are cesspoools of intrusive advertising and tracking. They’re so poorly built, with so much advertising, that they hardly even

Local and major news sites alike, are cesspoools of intrusive advertising and tracking. They’re so poorly built, with so much advertising, that they hardly even function any longer. Even if Google links to a news site, I won’t click. It’s probably 30 secs for my new iPhone to partially fail loading, abruptly reload, and then auto play video I didn’t ask for... while covering the article with more ads that I have to click to dismiss. Reading about the latest headlines is like sitting in a timeshare presentation, only it drains my phone battery and crashes my browser. It’s a shame that the media is so bad at producing media. The quality is down, the delivery is terrible, and they want more money.

Yetanfou 8y ago
Browsing the commercial web without a host of filtering is like having unprotected intercourse with random strangers. Ad blockers will take care of the advertising, auto-playing video won't auto-play if there is no auto-play to begin with, Javascript is blocked by uBlock in 'advanced user' mode or by using a browser like Privacy Browser which blocks it by default (and allows per-site exceptions to be made). Sometimes there's nothing left after that, true, but mostly it reduces the ad-infested misery to manageable proportions. This works on Android, it might work on iOS as well. Then again, it might not given the limited choice of browsers on that platform. To get the latest headlines I suggest using a RSS reader (e.g. 'News' on Nextcloud/Owncloud) and subscribing to those feeds which you deem interesting. This gives you headlines, sometimes with a snippet of content, often without but subscribe to a few different publications and you'll have the same news described using different headlines which often give enough insight into whether the item is worth your time.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  >To get the latest headlines I suggest using a RSS reader (e.g. 'News' on Nextcloud/Owncloud) and subscribing to those feeds which you deem interesting. This gives you headlines, sometimes with a snippet of content, often without but subscribe to a few different publications and you'll have the same news described using different headlines which often give enough insight into whether the item is worth your time. it also locks you into a bubble of your own creation with very little provocative or interesting content
  - Yetanfou 8y ago
    It would only do that if you limit your feed selection to your 'bubble', something you should not do. Add feeds which oppose your view to get a more balanced diet. This greatly expands the 'bubble' to the point of it no longer being discernible. Of course you can only read a limited number of articles in a given time frame but you'll have a much larger body of articles to choose from than those who rely on a single source. To the parent poster, what is your solution to escaping the 'bubble'? I do hope you're not relying on any profiling search engines (Google, Bing, etc) or ditto news aggregator (or, ${deity} forbid, Facebook) for that purpose as these actually reinforce the bubble perspective by expressly showing you material deemed to coincide with your viewpoints.
eiaoa 8y ago
> Local and major news sites alike, are cesspoools of intrusive advertising and tracking. They’re so poorly built, with so much advertising, that they hardly even function any longer. But that's an effect, though maybe one that will create a vicious cycle. It's not the cause. The revenue rug was pulled out from under local news websites, and they're struggling to keep the lights on. Advertising and tracking are how everyone says you need to make money on the internet nowadays, and they're just following the example set by Google, Facebook, et al. Focusing too much local news site's advertising and tracking practices is missing the elephant in the room. If local news is left to die, there will be little to no media oversight or local government. What happens in state legislatures is important, etc. If you require all these small organizations to have two competencies, you're going to get a lot more government corruption.
- Kalium 8y ago
  Local news organizations have always been required to maintain two competencies - advertising and journalism. This predates Google News, Google, and indeed the internet. You're completely right about the absolutely critical importance of a free, open, and brave press. Yet it's possible that this particular business problem, the one you have so wisely and correctly pointed to, is not novel. Newspapers historically have found a variety of ways to fund their operations. I hope they can continue to exhibit the entrepreneurial spirit that helps keep a vibrant press free!
  - flukus 8y ago
    > Local news organizations have always been required to maintain two competencies - advertising and journalism. This predates Google News, Google, and indeed the internet. 3. Distribution. News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits and now its gone.
    - eiaoa 8y ago
      > News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits and now its gone. A viable, independent media is vital to a well-functioning democracy. I just realized that the implication decision behind of all this talk (about how the new media need to find a viable business model) is that our system of government shouldn't stand unless some of its vital organs are profitable in a dog-eat-dog capitalist system. Capitalism is given a higher priority than democracy.
niftich 8y ago
Google's answer to this is a trifecta of AMP [1], Contributor [2], and Funding Choices [3] -- to deliver content signed by the publisher [4] from Google's CDN and display less-annoying ads in the meantime, or purchase an ad-free pass to the publisher through Google. This venture is predicated on the assumption that Google and the publishers both need each other: publishers want revenue from ads, revenue whose amount is proportional to the number of viewers, while Google wants quality destinations to which it can direct traffic and/or quality sources of content which it can display in a captive newsreader. This is a reality in a world where paid newspaper subscriptions are down, media makes money with just-in-time auctioned online display ads, and paywalls interfere with the positive effects of wide distribution, like the likelihood of new customer acquisition. [1] https://www.ampproject.org/ https://www.ampproject.org/ [2] https://contributor.google.com/ https://contributor.google.com/ [3] https://fundingchoices.google.com https://fundingchoices.google.com [4] https://github.com/WICG/webpackage https://github.com/WICG/webpackage
justinph 8y ago
It's a shame that google, the internet's largest advertising company, has done so little to help this. Instead of addressing the problem the hard way by talking to advertisers and, you know, using people skills, they approach it through engineering ways that push the problem to someone else: AMP, Lighthouse, speed-based pagerank, etc. Google is perpetuating this problem by whining about it but not actually addressing it any meaningful way.

Yetanfou 8y ago

Browsing the commercial web without a host of filtering is like having unprotected intercourse with random strangers. Ad blockers will take care of the advertising, auto-playing video won't auto-play if there is no auto-play to begin with, Javascript is blocked by uBlock in 'advanced user' mode or by using a browser like Privacy Browser which blocks it by default (and allows per-site exceptions to be made). Sometimes there's nothing left after that, true, but mostly it reduces the ad-infested misery to manageable proportions. This works on Android, it might work on iOS as well. Then again, it might not given the limited choice of browsers on that platform. To get the latest headlines I suggest using a RSS reader (e.g. 'News' on Nextcloud/Owncloud) and subscribing to those feeds which you deem interesting. This gives you headlines, sometimes with a snippet of content, often without but subscribe to a few different publications and you'll have the same news described using different headlines which often give enough insight into whether the item is worth your time.

kkarakk 8y ago
>To get the latest headlines I suggest using a RSS reader (e.g. 'News' on Nextcloud/Owncloud) and subscribing to those feeds which you deem interesting. This gives you headlines, sometimes with a snippet of content, often without but subscribe to a few different publications and you'll have the same news described using different headlines which often give enough insight into whether the item is worth your time. it also locks you into a bubble of your own creation with very little provocative or interesting content
- Yetanfou 8y ago
  It would only do that if you limit your feed selection to your 'bubble', something you should not do. Add feeds which oppose your view to get a more balanced diet. This greatly expands the 'bubble' to the point of it no longer being discernible. Of course you can only read a limited number of articles in a given time frame but you'll have a much larger body of articles to choose from than those who rely on a single source. To the parent poster, what is your solution to escaping the 'bubble'? I do hope you're not relying on any profiling search engines (Google, Bing, etc) or ditto news aggregator (or, ${deity} forbid, Facebook) for that purpose as these actually reinforce the bubble perspective by expressly showing you material deemed to coincide with your viewpoints.

eiaoa 8y ago

> Local and major news sites alike, are cesspoools of intrusive advertising and tracking. They’re so poorly built, with so much advertising, that they hardly even function any longer. But that's an effect, though maybe one that will create a vicious cycle. It's not the cause. The revenue rug was pulled out from under local news websites, and they're struggling to keep the lights on. Advertising and tracking are how everyone says you need to make money on the internet nowadays, and they're just following the example set by Google, Facebook, et al. Focusing too much local news site's advertising and tracking practices is missing the elephant in the room. If local news is left to die, there will be little to no media oversight or local government. What happens in state legislatures is important, etc. If you require all these small organizations to have two competencies, you're going to get a lot more government corruption.

Kalium 8y ago
Local news organizations have always been required to maintain two competencies - advertising and journalism. This predates Google News, Google, and indeed the internet. You're completely right about the absolutely critical importance of a free, open, and brave press. Yet it's possible that this particular business problem, the one you have so wisely and correctly pointed to, is not novel. Newspapers historically have found a variety of ways to fund their operations. I hope they can continue to exhibit the entrepreneurial spirit that helps keep a vibrant press free!
- flukus 8y ago
  > Local news organizations have always been required to maintain two competencies - advertising and journalism. This predates Google News, Google, and indeed the internet. 3. Distribution. News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits and now its gone.
  - eiaoa 8y ago
    > News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits and now its gone. A viable, independent media is vital to a well-functioning democracy. I just realized that the implication decision behind of all this talk (about how the new media need to find a viable business model) is that our system of government shouldn't stand unless some of its vital organs are profitable in a dog-eat-dog capitalist system. Capitalism is given a higher priority than democracy.

niftich 8y ago

Google's answer to this is a trifecta of AMP [1], Contributor [2], and Funding Choices [3] -- to deliver content signed by the publisher [4] from Google's CDN and display less-annoying ads in the meantime, or purchase an ad-free pass to the publisher through Google. This venture is predicated on the assumption that Google and the publishers both need each other: publishers want revenue from ads, revenue whose amount is proportional to the number of viewers, while Google wants quality destinations to which it can direct traffic and/or quality sources of content which it can display in a captive newsreader. This is a reality in a world where paid newspaper subscriptions are down, media makes money with just-in-time auctioned online display ads, and paywalls interfere with the positive effects of wide distribution, like the likelihood of new customer acquisition. [1] https://www.ampproject.org/ https://www.ampproject.org/ [2] https://contributor.google.com/ https://contributor.google.com/ [3] https://fundingchoices.google.com https://fundingchoices.google.com [4] https://github.com/WICG/webpackage https://github.com/WICG/webpackage

justinph 8y ago

It's a shame that google, the internet's largest advertising company, has done so little to help this. Instead of addressing the problem the hard way by talking to advertisers and, you know, using people skills, they approach it through engineering ways that push the problem to someone else: AMP, Lighthouse, speed-based pagerank, etc. Google is perpetuating this problem by whining about it but not actually addressing it any meaningful way.