7 ms·

This is what basically everyone else has done over the past decade. Google used to put a different background behind ads in its search (https://www.fsedigital.c

by mdasen 8mo ago

This is what basically everyone else has done over the past decade. Google used to put a different background behind ads in its search (https://www.fsedigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Google-results-page-in-2013.png https://www.fsedigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Google...). It made it really easy to tell what was an ad and skip over it quickly. Now it's a lot harder to quickly notice what's an ad and what isn't. Sites used to have banner ads. Now they show posts that look exactly like the organic posts in your feed, just with a small "sponsored", "promoted", or "ad" mark somewhere. Half the time the post is large enough that it takes up my entire screen and the "sponsored" mark is below and off-screen. If you go on Amazon, the "sponsored" text is much smaller and light gray rgb(87,89,89) while the product text is near-black rgb(15,17,17). They want to make the sponsored text less visible. Sometimes it's even unclear if the sponsored tag applies to a single product or a group of products. It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago.

echelon 8mo ago
It ought to be illegal to host ads for registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance). Especially if you have a marketplace monopoly. Especially if you used overwhelming force to turn the "URL Bar" into a search product and then bought up 90% market share where you can tax every single brand on the planet. Google is the most egregious with this with respect to Google Search. It ought to be illegal, frankly. Google Android is a runner up. Half the time I try to install an app, I get bamboozled into installing an ad placement app (and immediately undo it). Seems like Apple is following in the same footsteps. Amazon isn't blameless here, either. So much of our economy is being taxed by gatekeepers that installed themselves into a place that is impossible to dislodge. And the systems they built were not how the web originally worked. They dismantled the user-friendly behavior brick by brick, decade by decade. Google "Pokemon" -> Ad. Google "AWS" -> Amazon competitively bidding for their own trademark Google "Thinkpad" -> Lots of ads. Google "Anthropic" or "ChatGPT" -> I bet Google is happy to bleed its direct competitors like this. What the fuck is this, and why did we let it happen? Companies own these trademarks. Google turned the URL bar into a 100% Google search shakedown. I'm thinking about a grassroots movement to stop these shenanigans.
- Marsymars 8mo ago
  > It ought to be illegal to host ads for registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance). This makes me a bit uncomfortable because of how close it comes to infringing on freedom of speech, and how specific a rule it would for search engines (and chat bots) - i.e. there's no real analogy of "can't target trademarked terms" for any ad format other than search engines. I think my preference would be to simply enforce laws around fraud. If you're a business and you intentionally mislead people, that's fraud, pure and simple. Bring the enforcement hammer down so that companies don't dare make an ad that granny might mistake for not being an ad. Make them err far on the side of making ads look unmistakably like ads for fear of ruinous fines.
  - echelon 8mo ago
    You're not allowed to use Pikachu commercially. Why should Google? They're taking advantage of every trademark to make money. Googling a trademark should activate a "no bids" mode. If Google wants to defend this action, then they should explain why they turned the URL bar into a search product and bought up 90% of the real estate. They've been incredibly heavy handed in search, web, and ads.
    - Marsymars 8mo ago
      > You're not allowed to use Pikachu commercially. There are many uses of "Pikachu" that are reserved for the trademark holder, but by-and-large the point of trademark is to avoid consumer confusion by preventing people from passing off goods/services that aren't from the "Pikachu" holder as actually being from the "Pikachu" trademark holder. Generally, I am allowed to use "Pikachu" if it's in reference to Pikachu and doesn't involve passing off non-Pikachu things as actually being Pikachu things. If I'm a former employed-by-Nintendo Pikachu illustrator, I'm allowed to advertise that. (Even if I can't provide samples of my work.) I can advertise that I'm the "#1 seller of Pikachu snuggies" as long as I am the #1 seller of non-counterfeit Pikachu snuggies. I can charge people a subscription fee for full access to a website where I review Pikachu (and other pokemon). If I work at Walmart and someone asks me where they can get a Pikachu plush, I'm allowed to direct them to the Digimon plush section, for which I receive a kickback on sales. The consumer confusion happening when someone googles a trademark and gets ads for different things isn't due to trademark infringement, it's due to misleading ads, which shouldn't be allowed regardless of whether a search term is trademarked or not.
anthem2025 8mo ago
[dead]
2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo ago
Apple's whole selling point is they aren't pulling the same crap that the everyone else is. It's not a defense of Apple to say they're just doing what everyone else has already been doing. Think different?
- rudedogg 8mo ago
  Yes, this is part of what is supposed to justify the premium prices, is that they can have a different business model. But it seems Tim Cook can’t leave anything on the table. I’m really going to be irritated if we end up with a premium Siri. It’s going to undermine the privacy aspect, the hardware innovation, and everything else they have going for themselves despite missing the boat on AI
  - eastbound 8mo ago
    Even the CPU. Windows users lose probably 25% of their machine power to ads, telemetry and OEM spyware and spamware, back to Oracle’s Ask Bar in 2005.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - anthk 8mo ago
      I'd say Windows 98 with IE bundled in Explorer and Active Desktop.
      - pjmlp 8mo ago
        It was ahead of its time, now we have people shipping Electron all over the place.
        anthk 8mo ago
        I think IE, ActiveX and the like were reused in tons of VB5/6 applications... at least with zillions of Spanish shareware, such as amateur games, crossword puzzles, home agendas, book databases and the like. They worked smooth enough, but in a crazy insecure way. Today it's the reverse; Chromium/Blink can do sandboxing but they bundle everything. Video and audio codecs, HTML renderers, a JS engine, a CSS engine, TTF rendering engines, 2D drawing engines, their own window and process managers... half an OS.
3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
I am suddenly realizing how silly it is that I have put up with this for decades. Are GreaseMonkey or similar tools still around that would let me customize the CSS of sites? I am thinking I should be able to run my own styling to make the ads nearly invisible. Or do the big players do all sorts of tricks to make identifying the ad content so dynamic that it would require constant vigilance to maintain? I have heard that Facebook does insane rendering tricks to prevent people from scraping their sites, not impossible to imagine some companies obfuscate the ad selection. Probably a few dozen lines of CSS could give me a much better browsing experience.
- veqq 8mo ago
  > GreaseMonkey or similar tools still around that would let me customize the CSS of sites That's default firefox behavior.
  - bee_rider 8mo ago
    Funny enough, even iOS Safari has a “hide distracting items” button you can sorta use for this kind of thing. I guess it won’t work on the App Store though.
- downrightmike 8mo ago
  ublock origin does wonders. I use it to give HN a dark mode
  - 3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
    Sure enough, this looks great. Found a blog post where someone did the exact same thing. Unlike the Firefox mechanism of usercontent.css which requires a reboot after every change(?) this works dynamically on a page reload. Now trivial to restyle some content which would otherwise not hit a blocklist. https://darekkay.com/blog/ublock-website-themes/ https://darekkay.com/blog/ublock-website-themes/
    - hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago
pdpi 8mo ago
> It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago. It's not that shocking — them not doing that is part of why I keep buying their products. I believed their leadership understood that. Looking at the article, the kind interpretation is that this is the same wrong-headed shift towards uniformity at all costs we've seen elsewhere in their products. The less kind interpretation is that they're deliberately blurring the lines with ads. Either way, it erodes away some of the trust that has been their lifeblood for the better part of maybe two decades.
- jaffa2 8mo ago
  Absolutely this. I can’t agree with this more. Having been using apple macs for 2 decades now I’m wondering whether my next machine will be apple. There’s even a setting for the adverts in the system settings. This is disguising.
- rickdeckard 8mo ago
  Wait for the spin, i.e. "It's not a simple Ad, we are recommending a service valuable to you based on the interests of your anonymized persona." (aka a personalized Ad)
- pixl97 8mo ago
  >Either way, it erodes away some of the trust Lets say you compete in a market with 3 players. You have a 95% trust rating. Your other competitors have a 55% and 35% trust rating. Modern capitalism would tell you that you have a 40% trust margin you can burn to make more profit with.
bool3max 8mo ago
What’s interesting to me is that no matter how “hidden” the AD indicator may be, my brain always seems to very quickly train itself to swiftly skip such posts when scrolling/browsing. Or I could simply be another clueless victim of advertising. If only I could know the number of sponsored posts I never consciously acknowledge and am influenced by on the daily.
- tartoran 8mo ago
  If the vast majority of people recognized ads and skipped them as more technically minded people do, they'd either not do that or step up a notch and make them even harder to spot. The reality is that these dark patterns do work for a large part of the users. We're the lucky few who can stay away though it is taxing and tiring.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago
    Or at least we’re arrogant enough to think it doesn’t affect us.
    - tartoran 8mo ago
      It does affect us quite a bit. This situation makes us have to think hard, makes us be very wary of what we click on or read and sometimes bites us as well. I personally find ads extremely tiring such that I mostly avoid add riddled products/sites and always use ad blockers. Quite on the contrary, the vast majority of users aren't even bothered by ads, they've been accustomed to them. My main point of the comment wasn't to be arrogant but to say that most users don't care.
  - mikkupikku 8mo ago
    The sickening truth is that most normals don't turn their attention in another way even when they recognize an ad for what it is.
    - gnatman 8mo ago
aucisson_masque 8mo ago
> It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago. I pay Apple premium price for their phones. If they become as bad as the other, what’s the point to pay so much ?
- mnsc 8mo ago
  Conspicuous consumption? Like always?
- andsoitis 8mo ago
  You don’t think the hardware and software ecosystem are superior to the competition?
  - Andaith 8mo ago
    Not OP, but I think they still have the lead in hardware. However, I'm using an iPhone 14 which apparently released 4 years ago now, and it's still plenty fast enough for all my needs. If it lasts another 4 years, I won't update. That's probably their problem. Do I think the software ecosystem is superior? I _hate_ using the app store with a passion. I _hate_ trying to find an app for my needs(most recently a gym app) and there's 40 options and they're all a monthly subscription. I _hate_ the advertising that my children get trapped in while playing a game(I sometimes have to switch to data so that my pihole isn't used so that the ads can load so that the game will work at all), but the ads don't have a timer or an X in the top right, you have to interact with them the right way to escape. But most of all, I _HATE_ that all my daughter wants is a draw-by-numbers game and there's literally hundreds of almost identical games which all charge $10+ a MONTH for the privilege. Nah, I don't think the software ecosystem is superior. Although Google trying to stop sideloading does make me think they're happy racing to the goddamn bottom.
    - kakacik 8mo ago
      Any 4 year old medium range Android phone is mighty fine these days, ie Samsungs just keep chugging, mine S22 ultra still has fine battery and rest is like new and I've seen the same for lower tiers. Market won't allow much gap anymore
mihaaly 8mo ago
What is shocking is that deception is the common. Accepted, argued for by some. Loosing trust of the site/app doing the deception is the result. Becoming common, accepted, trend, and then loosing trust in the whole industry is the result.
- sdwr 8mo ago
  Yeah, it's bad enough for capable users, but it's a nightmare for old people and the unaware. The online space is full of scams, and there's no real safe haven.
BiteCode_dev 8mo ago
It's not a trick; it's the closest they can get away with lying with plausible deniability. To sell you ads that are mostly lies already.
beAbU 8mo ago
On amazon.ie at least, the sponsored products are so hilariously out of place it's dead easy to spot them, and banner blindness kicks in. E.g. I search for "nuk baby bottle warmer" and the first result is a window washing squeegee and the second is a bathroom grime scrubber.
- hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago
  Works as intended. If you’re looking for a baby bottle it’s reasonable to assume that your house is in disarray from the whole new baby in the house thing, and it’s above average probability that you’ll buy completely unrelated products during your search.
  - xattt 8mo ago
    Except a portion of the population has been accustomed to not buying crap that’s been pitched infomercial-style.
BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
I like how, the way you've described it, it sounds as if, with the effort they go to to make ads as difficult to identify as possible, they're trying to hide their shame. It's tacit admission that people need to be 'tricked' into thinking that the advertising is actually an organic result. It's manipulative. It's an admission of the fact that advertising actively gets in the way of the service they're (incidentally) providing that 'the people' actually find useful. Unfortunately this is just a much longer way of saying 'you're the product'.
- spolitry 8mo ago
  There’s no shame. They want money, ad clicks make money, and users avoid things they know are ads, so content providers obscure the ads identification signal. Stop anthropomorphizing corporations. They hate that.
Hammershaft 8mo ago
Amazon is particularly wild because you can use the site without realizing %70 of your results are ads.
- Traubenfuchs 8mo ago
  I‘d argue it‘s often 100% unless you are looking for things so extremely specific no one paid ad/placement money for it.
  - coredog64 8mo ago
    Not even then, because search wants to show you something and it will just randomly grab ad placements to make up the difference.
    - abustamam 8mo ago
      Yeah I'll often look for something specific and I'll see listings that have nothing to do with what I'm looking for. Like I think I was looking for wide mouth nipples for baby bottles, a specific brand and model, and I was seeing baby toys. Like ok, they surmised I have a baby... But don't show it to me as a result for a query for something completely different.
- socalgal2 8mo ago
  I'm not trying to excuse Amazon but you do know what like, super markets, best buy etc, take ad money (promotional money?) from suppliers who pay for placement. That Samsung TV at the front being pushed at you, that's effectively ad money Samsung paid to have their TVs put at the front of the store. Those cans of Coke stacked at the end of the isle or piled up near the entrance at your super market? Coke paid to have them placed there. I'm not saying it's good or that therefore Amazon or Apple should be excused. I'm just saying, the naieve me thought Coke was on the end of the isle because the store thought it's what customers wanted. No, it's what Coke wanted, and paid for. And it's the same with Amazon and now Apple.
  - 8mo ago
Terr_ 8mo ago
Found a series of Google screenshots over time, although some of the search terms are questionable. :p https://blog.scaledon.com/p/the-evolution-of-google-ads https://blog.scaledon.com/p/the-evolution-of-google-ads
- encom 8mo ago
  Ironically, as I scrolled a few pages down that site, the content was blocked by a popup and I closed the tab. The internet is over. Pack it up.
torben-friis 8mo ago
>It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago. They sell a walled garden. If shit gets inside the walls, we might as well come out. I’m not willing to pay the apple tax any longer. Let the ad sellers pay if they’re the main costumers.
- MonkeyClub 8mo ago
  > I’m not willing to pay the apple tax any longer. Problem here is that when you decide you no longer wish to pay the tax and want to exit the walled garden, you discover that there's a heap of functionality and convenience you'll have to let go, and add complexity and cost to your setup. I actively avoided relying on iCloud even when it was the sane option, but many people that will feel like the walled garden is no longer suiting them will have to figure out ways to move files, emails, and (crucially) communication channels out of the ecosystem. I think a large number of them will decide that it's not worth the hassle, and remain walled in. Which is the idea to begin with. Sure, this is HN, and many will say "screw it, I'll Nextcloud my way out", but the genpop will remain within the gilded cage.
  - isodev 8mo ago
    > here's a heap of functionality and convenience you'll have to let go That's a very outdated point of view. All mobile ecosystems have practical feature parity. Convenience - that's a tricky one. With Apple stuff, you only have convenience if you're one of the bubble people who has their entire family and close friends in the Apple ecosystem. The reality outside that is that for every 1 iOS person, there are ~2 non iOS people they need to collaborate with and share stuff. Convenience has left the room a long time ago.
    - chasing0entropy 8mo ago
      Oh how I wish that was universally true. Unfortunately ive experienced strong discrimination for green checks especially amongst boutique SMB servicers
  - 8mo ago
KolibriFly 8mo ago
Yet when Apple adopts the same patterns, it feels less like "catching up" and more like quietly abandoning a standard they once benefited from
helsinkiandrew 8mo ago
> Now it's a lot harder to quickly notice what's an ad and what isn't. Everything in the app store is an ad - all the content is produced to get people to download Apps. It's just that some is 'promoted'. I'd be interested in hearing from any HN readers that use the App store to actually discover apps - don't people do Web/Reddit searches to see what people are using and rate and then search by name? Even an LLM can provide an overview of what's available and summarise features, drawbacks, and reviews.
patrick451 8mo ago
Apple not adopting these kinds of user hostile designs is why a lot of us were happy to a premium for their products. I guess Cook is just too stupid to understand that.
- troyvit 8mo ago
  What it must be like to be an Apple hardware engineer these days, designing the most beautiful physical devices in personal computing, then handing it over to the bosses where they load it up with this schlock.
gwd 8mo ago
> It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago. Is it a coincidence that they started exploring this once they've been forbidden from collecting the "Apple Tax"? This is exactly why I've been arguing against preventing Apple from collecting money from developers: the laws of capitalism will force them to collect money somewhere else, and putting ads in their app store is the obvious next step.
dormento 8mo ago
> just with a small "sponsored", "promoted", or "ad" mark somewhere And often, the only reason they do that is due to legal requirements.
snarf21 8mo ago
Yeah, we need a law that these are very much visually distinguished and in the same color so we can learn to ignore them. So much of the web is completely anti-consumer. I used to look for stuff on Poshmark but now when you search it is almost impossible to find your search results as everything is "Promoted". So I just gave up and stop using their product.
spacecadet 8mo ago
This is the eventual evolution of any platform that sells ads or sponsored content. Who is paying the bills? App developers and their desire to bring on customers...
heraldgeezer 8mo ago
This is the end goal of having apps instead of browsers. On an app I have to see the ad. On a website I can use Firefox + ublock origin and I won't see an advert.
fooey 8mo ago
Amazon is so bad it's getting difficult to find the actual search results

by mdasen 8mo ago

echelon 8mo ago

It ought to be illegal to host ads for registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance). Especially if you have a marketplace monopoly. Especially if you used overwhelming force to turn the "URL Bar" into a search product and then bought up 90% market share where you can tax every single brand on the planet. Google is the most egregious with this with respect to Google Search. It ought to be illegal, frankly. Google Android is a runner up. Half the time I try to install an app, I get bamboozled into installing an ad placement app (and immediately undo it). Seems like Apple is following in the same footsteps. Amazon isn't blameless here, either. So much of our economy is being taxed by gatekeepers that installed themselves into a place that is impossible to dislodge. And the systems they built were not how the web originally worked. They dismantled the user-friendly behavior brick by brick, decade by decade. Google "Pokemon" -> Ad. Google "AWS" -> Amazon competitively bidding for their own trademark Google "Thinkpad" -> Lots of ads. Google "Anthropic" or "ChatGPT" -> I bet Google is happy to bleed its direct competitors like this. What the fuck is this, and why did we let it happen? Companies own these trademarks. Google turned the URL bar into a 100% Google search shakedown. I'm thinking about a grassroots movement to stop these shenanigans.

Marsymars 8mo ago
> It ought to be illegal to host ads for registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance). This makes me a bit uncomfortable because of how close it comes to infringing on freedom of speech, and how specific a rule it would for search engines (and chat bots) - i.e. there's no real analogy of "can't target trademarked terms" for any ad format other than search engines. I think my preference would be to simply enforce laws around fraud. If you're a business and you intentionally mislead people, that's fraud, pure and simple. Bring the enforcement hammer down so that companies don't dare make an ad that granny might mistake for not being an ad. Make them err far on the side of making ads look unmistakably like ads for fear of ruinous fines.
- echelon 8mo ago
  You're not allowed to use Pikachu commercially. Why should Google? They're taking advantage of every trademark to make money. Googling a trademark should activate a "no bids" mode. If Google wants to defend this action, then they should explain why they turned the URL bar into a search product and bought up 90% of the real estate. They've been incredibly heavy handed in search, web, and ads.
  - Marsymars 8mo ago
    > You're not allowed to use Pikachu commercially. There are many uses of "Pikachu" that are reserved for the trademark holder, but by-and-large the point of trademark is to avoid consumer confusion by preventing people from passing off goods/services that aren't from the "Pikachu" holder as actually being from the "Pikachu" trademark holder. Generally, I am allowed to use "Pikachu" if it's in reference to Pikachu and doesn't involve passing off non-Pikachu things as actually being Pikachu things. If I'm a former employed-by-Nintendo Pikachu illustrator, I'm allowed to advertise that. (Even if I can't provide samples of my work.) I can advertise that I'm the "#1 seller of Pikachu snuggies" as long as I am the #1 seller of non-counterfeit Pikachu snuggies. I can charge people a subscription fee for full access to a website where I review Pikachu (and other pokemon). If I work at Walmart and someone asks me where they can get a Pikachu plush, I'm allowed to direct them to the Digimon plush section, for which I receive a kickback on sales. The consumer confusion happening when someone googles a trademark and gets ads for different things isn't due to trademark infringement, it's due to misleading ads, which shouldn't be allowed regardless of whether a search term is trademarked or not.

anthem2025 8mo ago

[dead]

2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo ago

Apple's whole selling point is they aren't pulling the same crap that the everyone else is. It's not a defense of Apple to say they're just doing what everyone else has already been doing. Think different?

rudedogg 8mo ago
Yes, this is part of what is supposed to justify the premium prices, is that they can have a different business model. But it seems Tim Cook can’t leave anything on the table. I’m really going to be irritated if we end up with a premium Siri. It’s going to undermine the privacy aspect, the hardware innovation, and everything else they have going for themselves despite missing the boat on AI
- eastbound 8mo ago
  Even the CPU. Windows users lose probably 25% of their machine power to ads, telemetry and OEM spyware and spamware, back to Oracle’s Ask Bar in 2005.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - anthk 8mo ago
    I'd say Windows 98 with IE bundled in Explorer and Active Desktop.
    - pjmlp 8mo ago
      It was ahead of its time, now we have people shipping Electron all over the place.
      - anthk 8mo ago
        I think IE, ActiveX and the like were reused in tons of VB5/6 applications... at least with zillions of Spanish shareware, such as amateur games, crossword puzzles, home agendas, book databases and the like. They worked smooth enough, but in a crazy insecure way. Today it's the reverse; Chromium/Blink can do sandboxing but they bundle everything. Video and audio codecs, HTML renderers, a JS engine, a CSS engine, TTF rendering engines, 2D drawing engines, their own window and process managers... half an OS.

3eb7988a1663 8mo ago

I am suddenly realizing how silly it is that I have put up with this for decades. Are GreaseMonkey or similar tools still around that would let me customize the CSS of sites? I am thinking I should be able to run my own styling to make the ads nearly invisible. Or do the big players do all sorts of tricks to make identifying the ad content so dynamic that it would require constant vigilance to maintain? I have heard that Facebook does insane rendering tricks to prevent people from scraping their sites, not impossible to imagine some companies obfuscate the ad selection. Probably a few dozen lines of CSS could give me a much better browsing experience.

veqq 8mo ago
> GreaseMonkey or similar tools still around that would let me customize the CSS of sites That's default firefox behavior.
- bee_rider 8mo ago
  Funny enough, even iOS Safari has a “hide distracting items” button you can sorta use for this kind of thing. I guess it won’t work on the App Store though.
downrightmike 8mo ago
ublock origin does wonders. I use it to give HN a dark mode
- 3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
  Sure enough, this looks great. Found a blog post where someone did the exact same thing. Unlike the Firefox mechanism of usercontent.css which requires a reboot after every change(?) this works dynamically on a page reload. Now trivial to restyle some content which would otherwise not hit a blocklist. https://darekkay.com/blog/ublock-website-themes/ https://darekkay.com/blog/ublock-website-themes/
  - hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago

pdpi 8mo ago

> It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago. It's not that shocking — them not doing that is part of why I keep buying their products. I believed their leadership understood that. Looking at the article, the kind interpretation is that this is the same wrong-headed shift towards uniformity at all costs we've seen elsewhere in their products. The less kind interpretation is that they're deliberately blurring the lines with ads. Either way, it erodes away some of the trust that has been their lifeblood for the better part of maybe two decades.

jaffa2 8mo ago
Absolutely this. I can’t agree with this more. Having been using apple macs for 2 decades now I’m wondering whether my next machine will be apple. There’s even a setting for the adverts in the system settings. This is disguising.
rickdeckard 8mo ago
Wait for the spin, i.e. "It's not a simple Ad, we are recommending a service valuable to you based on the interests of your anonymized persona." (aka a personalized Ad)
pixl97 8mo ago
>Either way, it erodes away some of the trust Lets say you compete in a market with 3 players. You have a 95% trust rating. Your other competitors have a 55% and 35% trust rating. Modern capitalism would tell you that you have a 40% trust margin you can burn to make more profit with.

bool3max 8mo ago

What’s interesting to me is that no matter how “hidden” the AD indicator may be, my brain always seems to very quickly train itself to swiftly skip such posts when scrolling/browsing. Or I could simply be another clueless victim of advertising. If only I could know the number of sponsored posts I never consciously acknowledge and am influenced by on the daily.

tartoran 8mo ago
If the vast majority of people recognized ads and skipped them as more technically minded people do, they'd either not do that or step up a notch and make them even harder to spot. The reality is that these dark patterns do work for a large part of the users. We're the lucky few who can stay away though it is taxing and tiring.
- hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago
  Or at least we’re arrogant enough to think it doesn’t affect us.
  - tartoran 8mo ago
    It does affect us quite a bit. This situation makes us have to think hard, makes us be very wary of what we click on or read and sometimes bites us as well. I personally find ads extremely tiring such that I mostly avoid add riddled products/sites and always use ad blockers. Quite on the contrary, the vast majority of users aren't even bothered by ads, they've been accustomed to them. My main point of the comment wasn't to be arrogant but to say that most users don't care.
- mikkupikku 8mo ago
  The sickening truth is that most normals don't turn their attention in another way even when they recognize an ad for what it is.
  - gnatman 8mo ago

aucisson_masque 8mo ago

> It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago. I pay Apple premium price for their phones. If they become as bad as the other, what’s the point to pay so much ?

mnsc 8mo ago
Conspicuous consumption? Like always?
andsoitis 8mo ago
You don’t think the hardware and software ecosystem are superior to the competition?
- Andaith 8mo ago
  Not OP, but I think they still have the lead in hardware. However, I'm using an iPhone 14 which apparently released 4 years ago now, and it's still plenty fast enough for all my needs. If it lasts another 4 years, I won't update. That's probably their problem. Do I think the software ecosystem is superior? I _hate_ using the app store with a passion. I _hate_ trying to find an app for my needs(most recently a gym app) and there's 40 options and they're all a monthly subscription. I _hate_ the advertising that my children get trapped in while playing a game(I sometimes have to switch to data so that my pihole isn't used so that the ads can load so that the game will work at all), but the ads don't have a timer or an X in the top right, you have to interact with them the right way to escape. But most of all, I _HATE_ that all my daughter wants is a draw-by-numbers game and there's literally hundreds of almost identical games which all charge $10+ a MONTH for the privilege. Nah, I don't think the software ecosystem is superior. Although Google trying to stop sideloading does make me think they're happy racing to the goddamn bottom.
  - kakacik 8mo ago
    Any 4 year old medium range Android phone is mighty fine these days, ie Samsungs just keep chugging, mine S22 ultra still has fine battery and rest is like new and I've seen the same for lower tiers. Market won't allow much gap anymore

mihaaly 8mo ago

What is shocking is that deception is the common. Accepted, argued for by some. Loosing trust of the site/app doing the deception is the result. Becoming common, accepted, trend, and then loosing trust in the whole industry is the result.

sdwr 8mo ago
Yeah, it's bad enough for capable users, but it's a nightmare for old people and the unaware. The online space is full of scams, and there's no real safe haven.

BiteCode_dev 8mo ago

It's not a trick; it's the closest they can get away with lying with plausible deniability. To sell you ads that are mostly lies already.

beAbU 8mo ago

On amazon.ie at least, the sponsored products are so hilariously out of place it's dead easy to spot them, and banner blindness kicks in. E.g. I search for "nuk baby bottle warmer" and the first result is a window washing squeegee and the second is a bathroom grime scrubber.

hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago
Works as intended. If you’re looking for a baby bottle it’s reasonable to assume that your house is in disarray from the whole new baby in the house thing, and it’s above average probability that you’ll buy completely unrelated products during your search.
- xattt 8mo ago
  Except a portion of the population has been accustomed to not buying crap that’s been pitched infomercial-style.

BLKNSLVR 8mo ago

I like how, the way you've described it, it sounds as if, with the effort they go to to make ads as difficult to identify as possible, they're trying to hide their shame. It's tacit admission that people need to be 'tricked' into thinking that the advertising is actually an organic result. It's manipulative. It's an admission of the fact that advertising actively gets in the way of the service they're (incidentally) providing that 'the people' actually find useful. Unfortunately this is just a much longer way of saying 'you're the product'.

spolitry 8mo ago
There’s no shame. They want money, ad clicks make money, and users avoid things they know are ads, so content providers obscure the ads identification signal. Stop anthropomorphizing corporations. They hate that.

Hammershaft 8mo ago

Amazon is particularly wild because you can use the site without realizing %70 of your results are ads.

Traubenfuchs 8mo ago
I‘d argue it‘s often 100% unless you are looking for things so extremely specific no one paid ad/placement money for it.
- coredog64 8mo ago
  Not even then, because search wants to show you something and it will just randomly grab ad placements to make up the difference.
  - abustamam 8mo ago
    Yeah I'll often look for something specific and I'll see listings that have nothing to do with what I'm looking for. Like I think I was looking for wide mouth nipples for baby bottles, a specific brand and model, and I was seeing baby toys. Like ok, they surmised I have a baby... But don't show it to me as a result for a query for something completely different.
socalgal2 8mo ago
I'm not trying to excuse Amazon but you do know what like, super markets, best buy etc, take ad money (promotional money?) from suppliers who pay for placement. That Samsung TV at the front being pushed at you, that's effectively ad money Samsung paid to have their TVs put at the front of the store. Those cans of Coke stacked at the end of the isle or piled up near the entrance at your super market? Coke paid to have them placed there. I'm not saying it's good or that therefore Amazon or Apple should be excused. I'm just saying, the naieve me thought Coke was on the end of the isle because the store thought it's what customers wanted. No, it's what Coke wanted, and paid for. And it's the same with Amazon and now Apple.
- 8mo ago

Terr_ 8mo ago

Found a series of Google screenshots over time, although some of the search terms are questionable. :p https://blog.scaledon.com/p/the-evolution-of-google-ads https://blog.scaledon.com/p/the-evolution-of-google-ads

encom 8mo ago
Ironically, as I scrolled a few pages down that site, the content was blocked by a popup and I closed the tab. The internet is over. Pack it up.

torben-friis 8mo ago

>It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago. They sell a walled garden. If shit gets inside the walls, we might as well come out. I’m not willing to pay the apple tax any longer. Let the ad sellers pay if they’re the main costumers.

MonkeyClub 8mo ago
> I’m not willing to pay the apple tax any longer. Problem here is that when you decide you no longer wish to pay the tax and want to exit the walled garden, you discover that there's a heap of functionality and convenience you'll have to let go, and add complexity and cost to your setup. I actively avoided relying on iCloud even when it was the sane option, but many people that will feel like the walled garden is no longer suiting them will have to figure out ways to move files, emails, and (crucially) communication channels out of the ecosystem. I think a large number of them will decide that it's not worth the hassle, and remain walled in. Which is the idea to begin with. Sure, this is HN, and many will say "screw it, I'll Nextcloud my way out", but the genpop will remain within the gilded cage.
- isodev 8mo ago
  > here's a heap of functionality and convenience you'll have to let go That's a very outdated point of view. All mobile ecosystems have practical feature parity. Convenience - that's a tricky one. With Apple stuff, you only have convenience if you're one of the bubble people who has their entire family and close friends in the Apple ecosystem. The reality outside that is that for every 1 iOS person, there are ~2 non iOS people they need to collaborate with and share stuff. Convenience has left the room a long time ago.
  - chasing0entropy 8mo ago
    Oh how I wish that was universally true. Unfortunately ive experienced strong discrimination for green checks especially amongst boutique SMB servicers
- 8mo ago

KolibriFly 8mo ago

Yet when Apple adopts the same patterns, it feels less like "catching up" and more like quietly abandoning a standard they once benefited from

helsinkiandrew 8mo ago

> Now it's a lot harder to quickly notice what's an ad and what isn't. Everything in the app store is an ad - all the content is produced to get people to download Apps. It's just that some is 'promoted'. I'd be interested in hearing from any HN readers that use the App store to actually discover apps - don't people do Web/Reddit searches to see what people are using and rate and then search by name? Even an LLM can provide an overview of what's available and summarise features, drawbacks, and reviews.

patrick451 8mo ago

Apple not adopting these kinds of user hostile designs is why a lot of us were happy to a premium for their products. I guess Cook is just too stupid to understand that.

troyvit 8mo ago
What it must be like to be an Apple hardware engineer these days, designing the most beautiful physical devices in personal computing, then handing it over to the bosses where they load it up with this schlock.

gwd 8mo ago

> It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago. Is it a coincidence that they started exploring this once they've been forbidden from collecting the "Apple Tax"? This is exactly why I've been arguing against preventing Apple from collecting money from developers: the laws of capitalism will force them to collect money somewhere else, and putting ads in their app store is the obvious next step.

dormento 8mo ago

> just with a small "sponsored", "promoted", or "ad" mark somewhere And often, the only reason they do that is due to legal requirements.

snarf21 8mo ago

Yeah, we need a law that these are very much visually distinguished and in the same color so we can learn to ignore them. So much of the web is completely anti-consumer. I used to look for stuff on Poshmark but now when you search it is almost impossible to find your search results as everything is "Promoted". So I just gave up and stop using their product.

spacecadet 8mo ago

This is the eventual evolution of any platform that sells ads or sponsored content. Who is paying the bills? App developers and their desire to bring on customers...

heraldgeezer 8mo ago

This is the end goal of having apps instead of browsers. On an app I have to see the ad. On a website I can use Firefox + ublock origin and I won't see an advert.

fooey 8mo ago

Amazon is so bad it's getting difficult to find the actual search results