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A cartoon butt clenching a bar of soap has invaded my online ads
- LorenDB 2y agoThis is a perfect reason to install uBlock Origin.
- slater 2y agoSidenote: your site's SCSS file 404s - https://lorendb.dev/css/main.scss https://lorendb.dev/css/main.scss (Firefox, macOS)
- LorenDB 2y agoThanks, I've fixed it.
- mindslight 2y agoSeriously. If you have enough time and self actualization to complain about the content of online ads, then you have more than enough time to install an ad blocker and be done with that particular form of malware.
- Veuxdo 2y agoThis might be a fine solution for individuals, but of course won't help the ads/publishing industry recover from its current death spiral.
- bastawhiz 2y agoIt's not intended to help anyone who runs ads.
- Wowfunhappy 2y agoWhat is your suggested economic model for internet content? Do you prefer paywalls?
- QuadmasterXLII 2y agoWhat’s the economic model for hacker news commenters?
- decremental 2y ago[dead]
- Wowfunhappy 2y agoCommenting on Hacker News is fun. But I'm really glad the internet has professional journalists as well.
- jszymborski 2y agoYes
- thfuran 2y agoYes, involving a third party with interests contrary to the producer or consumer of the material just adds poor incentives that inevitably lead to poor outcomes.
- bastawhiz 2y agoI tend to pay for quality content, yes.
- gedy 2y agoSomehow, TV and newspapers survived and thrived on non- targeted, not-filthy ads for decades. I'd have little problem with static ads in webpages that looked like the ones in magazines I grew up with.
- cortesoft 2y agoIs it our job to figure out someone else’s business model?
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoBy "help" I'm assuming you mean the same thing as what I would mean, that is: the acceleration of said death spiral.
- rekabis 2y ago> This is a perfect reason to install uBlock Origin. For anyone who isn’t running Chrome, that is.
- FLT8 2y agoAnd anyone not on iOS stuck with webkit.
- NikkiA 2y agoThey knew what they were getting into, it's never been a secret that iOS is advertising hell.
- rekabis 2y agoAdd the AdGuard DNS configuration profile to your iDevice as a whole (no need for any separate app), and ads are blocked for everything except apps whose ads are drawn from the same source as their content. https://adguard-dns.io/en/blog/encrypted-dns-ios-14.html https://adguard-dns.io/en/blog/encrypted-dns-ios-14.html So yeah. While it won’t kill ads in apps like YouTube or Pinterest, it will kill nearly all ads in web pages and apps that source their ads from external providers.
- dash2 2y agoI have exactly this problem of gross online ads, sometimes featuring ways to clear my bowels by eating/not eating bananas. The graphics are, well, graphic. I never click ads and I turn off personalisation wherever possible. Could it be that the system is punishing me somehow? Is this some dystopian algorithm?
- Veuxdo 2y ago> I turn off personalisation wherever possible Think about it: if the ad auction house knows nothing about you, then you'd expect to only get least-common-denominator ads. Everyone has a butt, after all.
- fallingsquirrel 2y agoA saner solution would be to target based on the content (like advertisers did for centuries before the internet). If someone's reading an article about guitars, there's a good bet they'll respond more favorably to a guitar ad than to a picture of someone's ass. Common sense was a casualty in the transition to the internet.
- mthoms 2y agoSure, that’s obvious. The problem is the tons of content that isn’t easily associated with a product or service. Like news and opinion (many of the article’s examples are from The NY Times)
- fallingsquirrel 2y agoNews about crime -> advertise a home security system Opinion piece about politics -> advertise a book of the same political leaning I guarantee, no matter the topic, there's always a more relevant option than someone's ass.
- mthoms 2y agoThere's books about everything, sure. It doesn't mean this approach is profitable enough to support the news gathering in the first place. >more relevant option than someone's ass That's a pretty low bar. I'm not arguing for this kind of ad. I'm only saying that keeping all ads exclusively topical would be highly unprofitable for many categories of information you find on the internet. >News about crime -> advertise a home security system That would create some pretty perverse incentives for news organizations to fear monger about local crime (more than usual that is). What could go wrong?
- sen 2y agoComplaining about annoying ads while having ads literally every paragraph.
- to11mtm 2y agoEh... My adverts are all related to various people in my and my partner's friend circle and past, but it's really weird overall. My ex-wife ran off with a man who offered to 'help fix our marriage'[0], that man became a 'preacher'. There were a few periods where I would get lots of adverts telling me to go to Israel to 'get closer to my religion' after that. When I became friends with someone on discord I started getting a lot of ads for Schizophrenia meds. During Covid, I had a conversation with a colleague about 'getting tested for covid' and the fucking ad engine decided to slip in ads where a bunch of men in a bar are chatting all happy and the announcer politely talks about STD testing in the foreground. Speaking of, the last few days I've been getting lots of ads for PReP. It took me a minute for that one, my best guess at present is some friends that are swingers got engaged recently so they've come up more in conversation. ----- The most shocking to this day however, was way back when Youtube ads got the juxtoposition of "You looked up how your boss's boss was a goat breeder" and "Watching Periodic Table of the Elements" as backgroudfall-asleep audio, led to a a few months straight of advertisements for a company selling Tanks to hold insemination material, 'SemenTanks.com'. Still in business despite the garish font they used 11+ years ago. [0] - I knew what was happening off the get go but the progression afterwards is hilarious to me considering how he bragged about all of his piracy and hackintoshing.
- WJW 2y agoPro tip: install an ad blocker and don't be bothered by any of this ever again.
- darth_avocado 2y agoThe best part of the article is the fact that they have to label each screenshot as “ars technical screenshot” because otherwise a reader will not be able to follow the article because of all the other ads they themselves show on almost every other paragraph.
- cortesoft 2y agoYes, this might be one of the few articles where I spent time looking at the ads, just so I could compare. They were all things I would never be interested in, although thankfully none of them were butts.
- throw310822 2y agoIt's nice that they invite you to subscribe to "contribute to our bottom line"; but it's a pity they didn't take the occasion to label the screenshots as "arse technica".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lagniappe 2y agoJust wash your butt, man. No Wipe November isn't for another month.
- derbOac 2y agoOne thing I miss from paper newspapers was the placement of ads based on content on the page. So, for example, if I was looking at the calendar of theater events, or theater reviews, the page would be plastered with ads for performing arts events. It made a lot of sense. They weren't targeted to me as an individual, they were targeted to a reader interested in theater. They weren't off the wall ads about random things, they were focused on what the person might be looking for. This piece reminded me of this mainly because it shouldn't happen. Not just because it's annoying and disgusting but because the ads should be relevant and interesting to a reader of that content. I've noticed some similar things with podcasts sometimes, where the ads seem smartly relevant to the podcast focus. But it feels like for a lot of things on the internet, that insight is lost. I wouldn't hate ads so much if they were respectful of my bandwidth, electronic and mental, and actually respected me enough as a reader to try to put something there that's of interest to me, instead of constantly acting like I'm a random person, selected at random from everyone out there. You can figure out something about me based on what I'm looking at, without tracking me or anything.
- WJW 2y agoThis article was written by someone who has never heard of ad blockers ever.
- phist_mcgee 2y agoI assume that since they write for Ars, they want to support the site via ads.
- foxfired 2y agoEvery time I use a computer where they don't have adblock, I feel like the days when we installed chrome for those IE users. At the same time, telling someone who doesn't use adblock to use them feels like telling them to use limewire to download free music. Yes, it's the way to go. But every time it breaks one of their websites I have inadvertently volunteered to become their lifetime tech support.
- 8organicbits 2y agoThe only time recently that I noticed my ad blocker breaking a website was the UI for adding a DNS glue record on Namecheap. It looked like it was working, but the update didn't take. Their support immediately suggested ad blocker, and that was it. Are others seeing frequent issues where ad blockers break sites?
- jjj123 2y agoStereogum won’t work with ad blockers. The comments section of the Washington post didn’t work with my ad blocker until the last month or so.
- Corrado 2y agoIt's not frequent, but it does happen, and usually in unexpected ways. If the whole site is completely broken I usually turn off ad-block and everything is fine. The problem is when the site mostly works but doesn't do some little important thing, like save your changes, that it gets really frustrating.
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoI setup a pihole for my parents, and my dad would mention that every now and then a whole website just wouldn't work. I eventually got him to show me an example, and he was clicking on the top google results which, to me, were obviously ads and therefore went through the blocked ad.doubleclick.net domain, but to him they were legitimate search results. It's a reminder of the decades of lessons in cynicism that us tech folk take for granted (and the dim view of the world that these lessons impose on us).