5 ms·

> news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable To appease Google… Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast

by cush 3y ago

> news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable To appease Google… Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wallets

Solvency 3y ago
uh what? the average news site is hacked together by a motley crew of non-programmer marketing interns who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world none of this is to "appease google". it's malicious incompetence, malaise, and cynical stupidity.
- pompino 3y ago
  >who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world They do this because Google wants them to, so that their ranking goes up.
  - jjackson5324 3y ago
    What are you even talking about? That's not how SEO works in the slightest....? Lol am I still reading HN or is this Reddit? You can see the Core Web Vitals. What modern day news organizations are doing is nowhere close to that.
    - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
      It's the advertising arm of Google rather than the search part that incrntivises this stuff.
    - pompino 3y ago
      Google rewards them by ranking them so high. In any case, Google doesnt actually give a shit about any core web anything when they’re raking in the adsense monies. These are simple distractions, they know which side of the bread is buttered.
  - visarga 3y ago
    I opened the Google app on my phone to read the news feed, 9 out of 10 articles were unreadable under the cookie popups, floating videos I didn't even click to start playing, and other helpful offers getting in the way. It's shit, utter shit. Why don't they have "reading mode" to show only the text, I bet they are afraid of getting sued if they supported clean text like the HN app I have installed. On the laptop I always use ad blockers and don't see the whole scale of the disaster.
    - jwally 3y ago
      I've used firefox with adblock/ublock since I first learned about it 20-ish years ago. I have a vpn on my phone primarily because I can do dns adblocking. I gave up most news and social media around COVID times, and haven't watched ad supported tv in 10 years (oh god, I sound like the uni-bomber; lol) - so I forget how bad the cacophony of advertising is for normal people. That everyone who can doesn't instantly install an adblocker on their browser (I think its like ~30-50%) still blows me away... /rant
Animats 3y ago
Maybe if Google ignored news sites, things would improve. Look at the Washington Post site. One good article above the fold, a right column of clickbait, and more clickbait when you scroll. Then crap "lifestyle" articles. Pathetic.
valleyer 3y ago
> NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam You may be operating on a model of the New York Times from ten or more years ago. I know I often find myself resorting to this model, at least until I remind myself that it no longer reflects reality. Here are some of the headlines on the New York Times front page right now: The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex Ocasio-Cortez Never Steered Money to a Key Arm of Her Party. Until Now. New Zealanders Are Crazy for This Fruit. It’s Not the Kiwi. Salt Is Hiding Everywhere. Can You Spot It? What’s the Best Way to Get Rid of a Hangnail? Where to Buy Plants Online
- scarab92 3y ago
  Unfortunately the more news-worthy stories also suffer from a severe lack of viewpoint diversity. Audiences are already very familiar with the ideological narratives emanating from the NYT newsroom. It’s fine as flavour, but the NYT are so heavy handed with it that often the substance of the articles are distorted to fit the narrative.
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    Which "ideological narratives"? This is such a vague description that you could interpret it to mean anything, especially since the NYT has been getting blasted from all directions lately. Conservatives think it's left-leaning drivel, and progressives think it capitulates too much to viewpoints on the right.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      Progressives are 6% of the population: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/progressive-left/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/progressive-.... The NYT could be very left leaning and still get criticism from a small percentage of the population that’s even further left. One example: the NYT fired its opinion page editor for publishing an article by Tom Cotton calling to suppress the George Floyd riots with the National Guard. For context, calling in the Maryland National Guard to stop the Freddie Gray riots was one of the most popular things Larry Hogan ever did in that blue state. Cotton’s opinion was squarely in the mainstream, and by firing Bennett the NYT revealed itself to be quite far to the left. Another example is anything touching on affirmative action. Americans oppose taking race into account in hiring to increase diversity by a 3:1 margin. It’s an extremely unpopular and out-of-the-mainstream position. But the NYT engages in such hiring practices. And when you read the NYT’s coverage of such issues, including the supreme court’s decision in SFFA, it’s clear where the paper’s bias lies. This bias manifests in the way articles talk about events. For one thing, it’s quite obvious from the tone of the article what the author thinks about particular policies or events. An article about Biden’s declining support among minorities, for example, might be framed as a bad thing, instead of a positive development. You will also get selective use of what policies are labeled as “liberal” or “conservative.” Restricting abortion gets labeled as a “conservative” position (which it is), but affirmative action doesn’t get labeled as a “liberal position (which it is). You’ll also see a difference in when public opinion polling is disclosed. Articles on Dobbs heavily featured public opinion in favor of legalized abortion. But articles in SFFA usually didn’t mention longstanding polling opposing racial preferences.
freetinker 3y ago
A matter of opinion. Sure, maybe NY Times ain’t NY Post yet, but it doesn’t take that long for a frog to come to full boil, even on slow simmer.
visarga 3y ago
Since they sued OpenAI for copyright infringement I actively avoid them. I don't find them reasonable anymore.
- bionhoward 3y ago
  What is unreasonable about not wanting your news organization to be ripped off for free? What is reasonable about OpenAI’s “we learn fairly from everyone’s IP, but paying customers may not train competing models with outputs we gave them?” Imagine you paid a teacher and they said you weren’t allowed to teach someone else what they teach you, while they are actively teaching you things that other people taught them, and they’re so new at teaching, you wind up teaching them. Seems legit
  - cout 3y ago
    I agree; moreover, I don't even understand why there's any controversy. A set of weights for a network trained using a particular document is a derivative work.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      When I attended college and got a degree in Mechanical Engineering, that didn’t make all my future design output a derivative work (legally). I don’t earn money from AI/LLM, but I tend to think that there’s a point past which the derivative nature of a type of summarization is not obviously a derivative of that entire corpus of work. (At least not in a sense that’s meaningful/practical.)
      - xhkkffbf 3y ago
        Certainly not all of it, but if you were to cut and paste some words from one of your textbooks, maybe change a few words, and then pass it off as your own, I would call you a plagiarist or a thief. The NYT makes a credible argument that the AIs are just cutting and pasting from their training set, sometimes lining up words or phrases from different sources. There's a bit of synthesis going on, but not as much as you might do after 10 years on the job.
PopePompus 3y ago
I subscribe to the NYTs, and one thing that drives me nuts is their animated graphics which play in a loop on some articles. They aren't ads - they are artworks created for the story, but I find it really distracting to try to read text when there's some dancing cutesy image looping endlessly in my field of view. They really should add an option to let the reader opt out of that crap.
sokoloff 3y ago
> The games have no ads I’m pretty sure I wait through/ignore/click past an ad every time I play Connections.
atonse 3y ago
Eh really? I’m a paying subscriber to the NYT, and every now and then I browse the site without an ad blocker, it’s unbearable. But maybe we’re grading on a curve here. Also they have a mix of comically bad articles and really good ones. Whereas in the past there was some level of baseline journalistic integrity. Now I frequently read articles where at least once a week I have to check if I’m accidentally reading an op-ed, because it’s so opinionated. And this is even when I happen to agree with the political slant they’ve clearly taken. I don’t want any slant. I want factual, objective reporting, whether I like the outcome or not.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
NYT mobile app is busted with ad blocking. It tries to spam refresh the ad and freezes the whole app for multiple seconds every time it tries to show one. I already pay for a subscription, why should I be forced to see ads?
- cush 3y ago
  Not sure. I don’t see ads.
notatoad 3y ago
>to appease google the only reason they have to appease google is because they had given up on worrying about navigation or discovery on their own platforms, and ceded that to google. which is dumb. google's not forcing them to do anything, they gave up control and responsibility to google.

by cush 3y ago

Solvency 3y ago

uh what? the average news site is hacked together by a motley crew of non-programmer marketing interns who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world none of this is to "appease google". it's malicious incompetence, malaise, and cynical stupidity.

pompino 3y ago
>who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world They do this because Google wants them to, so that their ranking goes up.
- jjackson5324 3y ago
  What are you even talking about? That's not how SEO works in the slightest....? Lol am I still reading HN or is this Reddit? You can see the Core Web Vitals. What modern day news organizations are doing is nowhere close to that.
  - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
    It's the advertising arm of Google rather than the search part that incrntivises this stuff.
  - pompino 3y ago
    Google rewards them by ranking them so high. In any case, Google doesnt actually give a shit about any core web anything when they’re raking in the adsense monies. These are simple distractions, they know which side of the bread is buttered.
- visarga 3y ago
  I opened the Google app on my phone to read the news feed, 9 out of 10 articles were unreadable under the cookie popups, floating videos I didn't even click to start playing, and other helpful offers getting in the way. It's shit, utter shit. Why don't they have "reading mode" to show only the text, I bet they are afraid of getting sued if they supported clean text like the HN app I have installed. On the laptop I always use ad blockers and don't see the whole scale of the disaster.
  - jwally 3y ago
    I've used firefox with adblock/ublock since I first learned about it 20-ish years ago. I have a vpn on my phone primarily because I can do dns adblocking. I gave up most news and social media around COVID times, and haven't watched ad supported tv in 10 years (oh god, I sound like the uni-bomber; lol) - so I forget how bad the cacophony of advertising is for normal people. That everyone who can doesn't instantly install an adblocker on their browser (I think its like ~30-50%) still blows me away... /rant

Animats 3y ago

Maybe if Google ignored news sites, things would improve. Look at the Washington Post site. One good article above the fold, a right column of clickbait, and more clickbait when you scroll. Then crap "lifestyle" articles. Pathetic.

valleyer 3y ago

> NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam You may be operating on a model of the New York Times from ten or more years ago. I know I often find myself resorting to this model, at least until I remind myself that it no longer reflects reality. Here are some of the headlines on the New York Times front page right now: The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex Ocasio-Cortez Never Steered Money to a Key Arm of Her Party. Until Now. New Zealanders Are Crazy for This Fruit. It’s Not the Kiwi. Salt Is Hiding Everywhere. Can You Spot It? What’s the Best Way to Get Rid of a Hangnail? Where to Buy Plants Online

scarab92 3y ago
Unfortunately the more news-worthy stories also suffer from a severe lack of viewpoint diversity. Audiences are already very familiar with the ideological narratives emanating from the NYT newsroom. It’s fine as flavour, but the NYT are so heavy handed with it that often the substance of the articles are distorted to fit the narrative.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  Which "ideological narratives"? This is such a vague description that you could interpret it to mean anything, especially since the NYT has been getting blasted from all directions lately. Conservatives think it's left-leaning drivel, and progressives think it capitulates too much to viewpoints on the right.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    Progressives are 6% of the population: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/progressive-left/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/progressive-.... The NYT could be very left leaning and still get criticism from a small percentage of the population that’s even further left. One example: the NYT fired its opinion page editor for publishing an article by Tom Cotton calling to suppress the George Floyd riots with the National Guard. For context, calling in the Maryland National Guard to stop the Freddie Gray riots was one of the most popular things Larry Hogan ever did in that blue state. Cotton’s opinion was squarely in the mainstream, and by firing Bennett the NYT revealed itself to be quite far to the left. Another example is anything touching on affirmative action. Americans oppose taking race into account in hiring to increase diversity by a 3:1 margin. It’s an extremely unpopular and out-of-the-mainstream position. But the NYT engages in such hiring practices. And when you read the NYT’s coverage of such issues, including the supreme court’s decision in SFFA, it’s clear where the paper’s bias lies. This bias manifests in the way articles talk about events. For one thing, it’s quite obvious from the tone of the article what the author thinks about particular policies or events. An article about Biden’s declining support among minorities, for example, might be framed as a bad thing, instead of a positive development. You will also get selective use of what policies are labeled as “liberal” or “conservative.” Restricting abortion gets labeled as a “conservative” position (which it is), but affirmative action doesn’t get labeled as a “liberal position (which it is). You’ll also see a difference in when public opinion polling is disclosed. Articles on Dobbs heavily featured public opinion in favor of legalized abortion. But articles in SFFA usually didn’t mention longstanding polling opposing racial preferences.

freetinker 3y ago

A matter of opinion. Sure, maybe NY Times ain’t NY Post yet, but it doesn’t take that long for a frog to come to full boil, even on slow simmer.

visarga 3y ago

Since they sued OpenAI for copyright infringement I actively avoid them. I don't find them reasonable anymore.

bionhoward 3y ago
What is unreasonable about not wanting your news organization to be ripped off for free? What is reasonable about OpenAI’s “we learn fairly from everyone’s IP, but paying customers may not train competing models with outputs we gave them?” Imagine you paid a teacher and they said you weren’t allowed to teach someone else what they teach you, while they are actively teaching you things that other people taught them, and they’re so new at teaching, you wind up teaching them. Seems legit
- cout 3y ago
  I agree; moreover, I don't even understand why there's any controversy. A set of weights for a network trained using a particular document is a derivative work.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    When I attended college and got a degree in Mechanical Engineering, that didn’t make all my future design output a derivative work (legally). I don’t earn money from AI/LLM, but I tend to think that there’s a point past which the derivative nature of a type of summarization is not obviously a derivative of that entire corpus of work. (At least not in a sense that’s meaningful/practical.)
    - xhkkffbf 3y ago
      Certainly not all of it, but if you were to cut and paste some words from one of your textbooks, maybe change a few words, and then pass it off as your own, I would call you a plagiarist or a thief. The NYT makes a credible argument that the AIs are just cutting and pasting from their training set, sometimes lining up words or phrases from different sources. There's a bit of synthesis going on, but not as much as you might do after 10 years on the job.

PopePompus 3y ago

I subscribe to the NYTs, and one thing that drives me nuts is their animated graphics which play in a loop on some articles. They aren't ads - they are artworks created for the story, but I find it really distracting to try to read text when there's some dancing cutesy image looping endlessly in my field of view. They really should add an option to let the reader opt out of that crap.

sokoloff 3y ago

> The games have no ads I’m pretty sure I wait through/ignore/click past an ad every time I play Connections.

atonse 3y ago

Eh really? I’m a paying subscriber to the NYT, and every now and then I browse the site without an ad blocker, it’s unbearable. But maybe we’re grading on a curve here. Also they have a mix of comically bad articles and really good ones. Whereas in the past there was some level of baseline journalistic integrity. Now I frequently read articles where at least once a week I have to check if I’m accidentally reading an op-ed, because it’s so opinionated. And this is even when I happen to agree with the political slant they’ve clearly taken. I don’t want any slant. I want factual, objective reporting, whether I like the outcome or not.

HDThoreaun 3y ago

NYT mobile app is busted with ad blocking. It tries to spam refresh the ad and freezes the whole app for multiple seconds every time it tries to show one. I already pay for a subscription, why should I be forced to see ads?

cush 3y ago
Not sure. I don’t see ads.

notatoad 3y ago

>to appease google the only reason they have to appease google is because they had given up on worrying about navigation or discovery on their own platforms, and ceded that to google. which is dumb. google's not forcing them to do anything, they gave up control and responsibility to google.