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Who would have guessed the Smithsonian of all organizations would have so many video popup ads. Isn’t the greatest experience on mobile when so little of the c

• Zardoz84 9mo ago
  Ads ? What Ads... I forgot that I use Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin. I don't see any ads NEVER.
  • stronglikedan 9mo ago
    > I don't see any ads NEVER So you see some ads occasionally? Then why are you asking "what ads"?
• dyauspitr 9mo ago
  I can appreciate their troubles. How is someone supposed to pay for all the overhead that goes into research and writing these articles without a source of income. People also seem dead against subscriptions. The only way that seems to work is appealing to the LCD and raking in stream bucks but not all media/literature, especially the valuable kind, is conducive to that model.
  • shiroiuma 9mo ago
    >How is someone supposed to pay for all the overhead that goes into research and writing these articles without a source of income. I'm not sure, but we've been trying the online advertising model for a few decades now, and it's been terrible. Pop-ups, pop-unders, malware, I could go on and on. At some point it's fine to just say "no" to the advertisers after so much abuse. Also, there's nothing stopping a website from hosting their own ads: these generally are not blocked by ad-blockers because they're served from the same domain, rather than a known ad-serving domain. But they never want to do this for some reason.
    • toolazytologin 9mo ago
      The site hosting the ads seems like a red herring? Do you mean they could sell or design their own ads? If so, that seems like a difficult proposition. If we accept that most people won’t pay a subscription, and take ads off the table as an option, then I can only think of 2 other options: * charitable patrons (this is a thing, but I guess not effective enough?) * selling other products to subsidize the free content These both appear to have obvious problems and for a dubious goal of making another party subsidize the visitor’s consumption cost. Having the visitor cover their own cost seems reasonable. What currency do they have other than money or attention? Maybe a small work problem that provides an abstracted service to a separate payer (a la reCAPTCHA, but for $).
      • shiroiuma 9mo ago
        >Do you mean they could sell or design their own ads? No, I mean they could host their own ads. The way ad-blockers work is that they see requests from a web page to other domains, particularly known ad-serving domains, so they reject those requests, take those elements out of the page, etc. But they don't alter self-hosted images. So if a web page has a bunch of JPGs which are really ads and not just helpful illustrations, and embeds those into the page, the ad-blocker has no way of knowing these are actually ads, and can't block them. But these places never do this because they want to outsource the advertising to someone else, and the advertisers want to not just show ads, but also track how many times the ad was served, who it was served to, how long it was viewed, and lots of other information that isn't necessary for advertising (and was never a factor back when ads were simply printed on newspaper or shown on TV). In short, the advertisers insist on spying on people now. This should not be tolerated or excused, ever.
  • nephihaha 9mo ago
    "How is someone supposed to pay for all the overhead that goes into research and writing these articles without a source of income?" Some people here think it's wonderful most of Wikipedia was built without paying its editors. Depends who you ask.
    • dyauspitr 9mo ago
      That’s compiling existing research and information. What about new research with field agents and equipment? The Smithsonian does a lot of that.
• quinncom 9mo ago
  Smithsonian Mag used to be the Institution’s brain‑child, now it’s just a click‑bait lifestyle tabloid full of celebs. The magazine’s editorial directives have diverged from the institutions mission. They care more about pageviews and ads than research.
  • mmooss 9mo ago
    The front page has none of those things; I see: * "Queen Bumblebees’ Tongues Aren’t Built for Slurping Nectar" * "Why the Computer Scientist Behind the World’s First Chatbot Dedicated His Life to Publicizing the Threat Posed by A.I." * "NASA to Resume Search for Missing Mars Orbiter" * "Spaceflight Temporarily Changes the Position and Shape of Astronauts’ Brains, MRI Data Suggests" ... and more of the same. Where have you seen what you describe?
• shiroiuma 9mo ago
  It always amazes me how many people on "hacker news" don't use an ad-blocker.
  • nephihaha 9mo ago
    Well, some people hold very conformist views which is surprising too.