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Here's the reality. The Taboola news carousals at the bottom of most slow loading actual news sites are filled with total junk. One page per image websites, sup

Here's the reality. The Taboola news carousals at the bottom of most slow loading actual news sites are filled with total junk. One page per image websites, super slow, adblock goes crazy. I've literally NEVER had a good experience with these "Stories you may like" Google does something with a news carousel that loads fast and the content isn't crap. I get why publishers running things like taboola think it's terrible, but as a user interested in reading some quick news without going blind, I like it. Hacker news is the exception in terms of a quick loading / clean website. I was a google reader user heavily - so I like the more stripped down view of things even if it's "terrible". One other note about this study. This company's goal is not to educate but to sign up users. At least for myself, Folks who want / like a stripped down experience may just be less interested in being marketed to.

lol768 8y ago
> The Taboola news carousals at the bottom of most slow loading actual news sites are filled with total junk. This, a thousands times. For both Taboola and Outbrain it's clickbaity trash - usually misleading and low quality content. They're designed to "disrupt" so that people click on them and have in the past featured on blatantly false news stories. I'd honestly be ashamed to work at one of these sort of organisations and it further underlines how awful the web experience can be if you're not using an ad blocker. It's no surprise to me that AMP is popular among users if news sites are not including such garbage in their AMP renditions.
- freditup 8y ago
  It's interesting that so many people would enjoy AMP, because on my Android, viewing AMP sites in Google's main app often feels much slower than regular web browsing in Firefox for Android. The difference? I have an ad-blocker in Firefox, but not in Google's app. So Ad-blocking > AMP > Regular (as far as user-experience from a speed perspective). Obviously Google has a lot of incentive to make sure people don't go the ad-blocking route. Though not sure what is keeping ad-blocking from growing given its superiority - likely just a lack of awareness about the option. If ad-blocking ever did grow massively though, the internet would change in ways we haven't yet seen. Either ad-serving companies would win the arms battle and ad-blockers would become ineffective, or, the web would have to move to a new payment model (Brave-like perhaps). I'm not entirely sure what the ideal is - likely a model where users can choose between ads or micropayments is the most pragmatic world.
  - shandor 8y ago
    I remember this being speculated heavily as one of the most important reasons for Google implementing AMP in the first place.
  - NiceGuy_Ty 8y ago
    Firefox Focus is the fastest android browser experience. I use that as my default browser, and only swap to normal Firefox when using a site I need to login to
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Google AMP on iOS is also much worse than Safari + adBlocker. AMP also leaves out relevant content.
    - zapzupnz 8y ago
      My beef is that it used to jack the scrolling. I don't know if it still does.
      - trevyn 8y ago
        Considering the percentage of news sites that can't even scroll properly on iOS, I'm not sure this is a bad thing.
      - saagarjha 8y ago
        This has been partially fixed. AMP no longer scrolls at a different rate than other websites, but it still doesn't collapse the URL bar when scrolling.
    - ljm 8y ago
      A huge pet peeve of mine was that I'd google for something I once saw on Reddit, or maybe I just wanted to see a certain discussion. Google would identify the correct post, but then I'd either get it in AMP or new-redesign format, both of which present a terrible loss in readability (for the most part). With AMP in particular, there was no obvious link back towards Reddit itself. And with the redesign, the actual discussion was interrupted with sections showing what other posts you could read on the subreddit. Similarly, both lost the essential hierarchy and it was really hard to follow the threads of discussion. The whole thing was dreadful compared to using the decade old Reddit design. The modern stuff is crap.
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  I think the ads you get from Taboola put you through a really awful funnel to weed out one-eighth wits and anybody else smarter. It's like the "grooming" that a pedophile does or the badly spelled message you get from some Nigerian prince or somebody who says you won some lottery that you've never entered or even heard of before. If you click on Taboolah links and manage to sit through a 45 minute video of somebody droning on and using words they can't pronounce (e.g. "Bih Seph A Nol A" as opposed to "Bis Phenol a") you just might be dumb enough to punch in your credit card number and get an $80 a month supplement that you can never cancel. If it wasn't so offputting to ordinary people more complaints might go to the FTC and they might have something to fear from the authorities. As it is, public servants are paid too much to spend hours just to find out what the scam is if somebody reports it.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  dumb question: do Taboola and Outbrain try to infer the user's demographics based on the clickbait "news stories" the user clicks? e.g. some of these "stories" appeal specifically to fans of a particular TV show or actor from a specific time range.
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    No, and they have little reason to do so. They throw spaghetti at the wall, cater to low quality publishers and use your location to clumsily make it seem like the content is relevant to you with the most clickbaity headlines known to man. But the thing is ... it works. People are clicking on this nonsense and other people are paying for those clicks (and publishers making money in the process).
- astura 8y ago
  I saw an ad in one of those chum boxes[1] yesterday that was a common one, "drivers in [your city] are shocked by this new law." However, I noticed something right away about it that stuck out like a sore thumb - I live in the Northeast, for those who are unfamiliar with the Northeast, we have a lot of trees and greenery here, every year I have to crawl into my bushes and pull trees growing in there and pull trees that start growing in the foundation of my house and along my fence line. However, the picture was of some women being arrested in (what I would consider) a desert. IDK, just a really weird juxtaposition that stood out to me. [1] https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/ https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...
tyingq 8y ago
I assume you're free to implement taboola like widgets on an AMP page that link out to garbage.
- mastazi 8y ago
  Yeah, I don't get parent's argument "AMP is not that bad because Taboola". AMP is a technological solution and as such it doesn't prevent content creators from publishing crap.
manigandham 8y ago
AMP is a fork of HTML that pressures limited developer resources to maintain a version for Google's visitors while only being fast because of arbitrary framework limitations. You can get a far better outcome by having search results consider site speed as a factor in rankings, which would make all publishers improve their sites overnight. The reason Google doesn't do this is because they also run the biggest ad network in the world which runs 80% of the slow ads you see on websites. These projects within Google are common, similar to how it ranks down websites forcing web users to download an app, when their own websites do the same. AMP allows Google to keep people on Google domains, with better data collection and more control over the independent ad networks and analytics that can run on AMP pages.
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  > a version for Google's visitors And Microsoft's and Pinterest's and Baidu's and on and on. There are many search engines and link aggregators that preload AMP pages. You prefer that publishers make versions of their articles solely for Apple and other versions of their articles solely for Facebook? (Each has a proprietary competitor to AMP that actually have the disadvantages you listed.)
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    I’d prefer they stuck to HTML and CSS, with a bit of progressively enhanced JS on top if needed.
    - lern_too_spel 8y ago
      Which is fine but not a substitute to Facebook's or Apple's solutions. People want their articles to load instantly, not merely quickly, which means you need a subset of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that can be validated to be safe to preload, which is exactly what AMP is.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        Preloading is just making server calls which is already possible, and preloading the HTML of the page will give you most of the experience of an instant transition without any need to validate anything.

lol768 8y ago

> The Taboola news carousals at the bottom of most slow loading actual news sites are filled with total junk. This, a thousands times. For both Taboola and Outbrain it's clickbaity trash - usually misleading and low quality content. They're designed to "disrupt" so that people click on them and have in the past featured on blatantly false news stories. I'd honestly be ashamed to work at one of these sort of organisations and it further underlines how awful the web experience can be if you're not using an ad blocker. It's no surprise to me that AMP is popular among users if news sites are not including such garbage in their AMP renditions.

freditup 8y ago
It's interesting that so many people would enjoy AMP, because on my Android, viewing AMP sites in Google's main app often feels much slower than regular web browsing in Firefox for Android. The difference? I have an ad-blocker in Firefox, but not in Google's app. So Ad-blocking > AMP > Regular (as far as user-experience from a speed perspective). Obviously Google has a lot of incentive to make sure people don't go the ad-blocking route. Though not sure what is keeping ad-blocking from growing given its superiority - likely just a lack of awareness about the option. If ad-blocking ever did grow massively though, the internet would change in ways we haven't yet seen. Either ad-serving companies would win the arms battle and ad-blockers would become ineffective, or, the web would have to move to a new payment model (Brave-like perhaps). I'm not entirely sure what the ideal is - likely a model where users can choose between ads or micropayments is the most pragmatic world.
- shandor 8y ago
  I remember this being speculated heavily as one of the most important reasons for Google implementing AMP in the first place.
- NiceGuy_Ty 8y ago
  Firefox Focus is the fastest android browser experience. I use that as my default browser, and only swap to normal Firefox when using a site I need to login to
- scarface74 8y ago
  Google AMP on iOS is also much worse than Safari + adBlocker. AMP also leaves out relevant content.
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    My beef is that it used to jack the scrolling. I don't know if it still does.
    - trevyn 8y ago
      Considering the percentage of news sites that can't even scroll properly on iOS, I'm not sure this is a bad thing.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      This has been partially fixed. AMP no longer scrolls at a different rate than other websites, but it still doesn't collapse the URL bar when scrolling.
  - ljm 8y ago
    A huge pet peeve of mine was that I'd google for something I once saw on Reddit, or maybe I just wanted to see a certain discussion. Google would identify the correct post, but then I'd either get it in AMP or new-redesign format, both of which present a terrible loss in readability (for the most part). With AMP in particular, there was no obvious link back towards Reddit itself. And with the redesign, the actual discussion was interrupted with sections showing what other posts you could read on the subreddit. Similarly, both lost the essential hierarchy and it was really hard to follow the threads of discussion. The whole thing was dreadful compared to using the decade old Reddit design. The modern stuff is crap.
PaulHoule 8y ago
I think the ads you get from Taboola put you through a really awful funnel to weed out one-eighth wits and anybody else smarter. It's like the "grooming" that a pedophile does or the badly spelled message you get from some Nigerian prince or somebody who says you won some lottery that you've never entered or even heard of before. If you click on Taboolah links and manage to sit through a 45 minute video of somebody droning on and using words they can't pronounce (e.g. "Bih Seph A Nol A" as opposed to "Bis Phenol a") you just might be dumb enough to punch in your credit card number and get an $80 a month supplement that you can never cancel. If it wasn't so offputting to ordinary people more complaints might go to the FTC and they might have something to fear from the authorities. As it is, public servants are paid too much to spend hours just to find out what the scam is if somebody reports it.
HillaryBriss 8y ago
dumb question: do Taboola and Outbrain try to infer the user's demographics based on the clickbait "news stories" the user clicks? e.g. some of these "stories" appeal specifically to fans of a particular TV show or actor from a specific time range.
- nkozyra 8y ago
  No, and they have little reason to do so. They throw spaghetti at the wall, cater to low quality publishers and use your location to clumsily make it seem like the content is relevant to you with the most clickbaity headlines known to man. But the thing is ... it works. People are clicking on this nonsense and other people are paying for those clicks (and publishers making money in the process).
astura 8y ago
I saw an ad in one of those chum boxes[1] yesterday that was a common one, "drivers in [your city] are shocked by this new law." However, I noticed something right away about it that stuck out like a sore thumb - I live in the Northeast, for those who are unfamiliar with the Northeast, we have a lot of trees and greenery here, every year I have to crawl into my bushes and pull trees growing in there and pull trees that start growing in the foundation of my house and along my fence line. However, the picture was of some women being arrested in (what I would consider) a desert. IDK, just a really weird juxtaposition that stood out to me. [1] https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/ https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...

tyingq 8y ago

I assume you're free to implement taboola like widgets on an AMP page that link out to garbage.

mastazi 8y ago
Yeah, I don't get parent's argument "AMP is not that bad because Taboola". AMP is a technological solution and as such it doesn't prevent content creators from publishing crap.

manigandham 8y ago

AMP is a fork of HTML that pressures limited developer resources to maintain a version for Google's visitors while only being fast because of arbitrary framework limitations. You can get a far better outcome by having search results consider site speed as a factor in rankings, which would make all publishers improve their sites overnight. The reason Google doesn't do this is because they also run the biggest ad network in the world which runs 80% of the slow ads you see on websites. These projects within Google are common, similar to how it ranks down websites forcing web users to download an app, when their own websites do the same. AMP allows Google to keep people on Google domains, with better data collection and more control over the independent ad networks and analytics that can run on AMP pages.

lern_too_spel 8y ago
> a version for Google's visitors And Microsoft's and Pinterest's and Baidu's and on and on. There are many search engines and link aggregators that preload AMP pages. You prefer that publishers make versions of their articles solely for Apple and other versions of their articles solely for Facebook? (Each has a proprietary competitor to AMP that actually have the disadvantages you listed.)
- robin_reala 8y ago
  I’d prefer they stuck to HTML and CSS, with a bit of progressively enhanced JS on top if needed.
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago
    Which is fine but not a substitute to Facebook's or Apple's solutions. People want their articles to load instantly, not merely quickly, which means you need a subset of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that can be validated to be safe to preload, which is exactly what AMP is.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      Preloading is just making server calls which is already possible, and preloading the HTML of the page will give you most of the experience of an instant transition without any need to validate anything.