alt Hacker NewsThis 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...). 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.
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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.
> 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.
> 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 ?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.