Apple News Scam Ads

At this point, Tim Apple has to know quality has gotten significantly worse.

That is, us saying these things likely won’t create change.

What would motivate someone with the power to change things at Apple to make quality important again, or is the emperor not naked but truly and simply dead… and we should stop pretending otherwise? What’s next for people who care about well crafted things? A fork of some Linux distro we develop apps for? (Yes, please.)

(I’d talk about Nietzsche’s madman prematurely announcing the death of god, and how the point of the parable was that god WAS dead, it was just too early to tell everyone b/c there wasn’t enough practical difference yet for anyone to benefit from the knowledge.

But I think it is. Apple is dead. This is one of those “you can’t turn a battleship on a dime” situations, and we’re dealing with one of the top market cap co’s in the world. It’s past saving, and, in fact, is no longer a company whose nature allows it to be saved.)

Apple leadership only cares about money.

That's it.

They have no pride, decency or honor.

As soon as Valve creates a steamos laptop, or System76 breaks into the mainstream.

The prevailing belief among CEOs is that being a public company means your highest responsibility is making your shareholders richer, by making the stock price go up and issuing dividends. What you actually DO isn't as important as that it makes shareholders money.

Jobs' belief was closer to the original concept of stocks: Here is my company, here is what we are doing. If you think what we're doing is a good idea, you're welcome to invest, but your investment won't change what we're doing.

Jobs succeeded because he had incredible taste—he knew a good thing when he saw it, and his sense of what was "good" was shared by many people—and he had no problem telling you that your work wasn't in good taste in no uncertain terms.

Cook... he doesn't have that sense of taste. He's too polite, too invested, or both when it comes to assessing his employees' work and deciding whether to ship it. Under Cook, Apple products have backslid from "insanely great" to "eh, not so much worse than the alternative that it's worth switching, yet." Cook's priority is shareholder value, not changing the world... and changing the world is *expensive*.

Apple New isn't what it would've been under Jobs—news aggregation done right, with impeccable design and typography and a minimum of annoyance. Instead, it's trying to min-max services profit vs. user aggravation. Only the fact that the content providers to Apple News provide a WORSE experience in their native apps/websites makes Apple News worth using. Which means that Apple News is ripe for disruption, should content providers figure out the inverse relationship between annoyance and readership.

Dividends are for suckers. You use profit to buy your own stock instead (something Apple unsurprisingly excel at) thereby driving the the stock value even higher so that the C suite get performance bonuses, and large investors can use their portfolio value as collateral for loans (that they buy more stocks for)

It's nothing but greed, all the way down.

The flip-side way to look at this is: Maybe these crappy ads are a downstream symptom of effective user privacy?

Does Apple News have “high quality” personalized and targeted ads? I don’t know because I turned off personalized advertising in my settings but I know I get ‘high quality’ ads on the web because Google, etc. know where I surf.

“High quality” ads such as ones hawking the couch we were looking at (or bought) last week, food for the dog and horse that they’ve inferred I own because I bought a dog collar and crop I bought, or maybe for a new pregnancy because someone in my household bought something or other that they thought was private, etc.

So for me, a paid user of Apple News, if I must have ads, these cheesy, inappropriately-targeted ads are actually my preference. Makes them easy to ignore.

And for those who might say “Apple News should be ad-free” I say, yes, that’d be great.

But for comparison, as a paid subscriber of actual newspapers, I still get ads on their websites, and unfortunately, those are very accurately targeted at me thanks to Google, etc. running the ad-placement systems for them. (I do use an a blocker, though, so that web experience is somewhat better than Apple News WRT ads, though I prefer Apple News for some news surfing. The ability to block certain topics is great for calm morning reading.)

@Someone else I don’t think it’s the fact that they’re untargeted that makes them crappy.

"So for me, a paid user of Apple News, if I must have ads, these cheesy, inappropriately-targeted ads are actually my preference"

Right, ads for scams that steal people's money are your preference.

You're an actual insane person. You do know that, right? Apple could abduct you and amputate your balls, and you would praise them for ensuring you don't get testicular cancer.

I’m certain Apple has decided it’s easier and more profitable to pretend they care than actually care. My test is: would they/could they fix it if it was costing them money?

The answer in this case is yes. That means they don’t care

@Plume, please stop.

I've switched from News to Kagi News, and it is so much better.

It's not perfect, but it is once a day, covers the highlights, and does not have any crap.

@Michael, I think it does.

I think there’s a causative relationship between blocking personalized ads, increased user privacy, and the crappy ads folks get on Apple News.

Why? Because I just did an experiment where I turned on Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising > Personalized Ads > On, and within about 10 minutes, I got bigger, high-quality, targeted ads in Apple News.

It wasn’t immediate — even after quitting the app — I had to give it some time before they showed up, but now I see ads I’ve never seen before: higher-quality 2-up (two per ad spot), 1-up, and full-page ads from brands like TurboTax, Visa, and other recognizable ones, and without sharing the specifics, they were accurately targeted.

This is in comparison to the 4-up Toobla-style junky scattershot ads I previously got basically for every ad slot when I had “personalized ads” off.

Give it a try yourself, and I think you’ll see what I mean.

For me, this is good news for the reasons I explained above… If I get ads, I don’t want them personalized to me. Some people like them, but I don’t, so these crappy ads are my singing canary in the coal mine. And for me, proof that Apple really is more private.

Just another way to think about it.

"The flip-side way to look at this is: Maybe these crappy ads are a downstream symptom of effective user privacy?"

They are the same kinds of ads you see on the rest of the crappy web though.

"@Plume, please stop."

After you.

I find your comments unconvincing and insulting. You consistently take Apple's side, regardless of how atrocious their behavior is. Currently, you are defending their decision to show ads for scams to their users. Not just ads for shitty products, but for fraud!

You assert plainly false things and then dismiss people who know better and point out where you are wrong. You're constantly shifting goalposts, but even more commonly, you just don't acknowledge responses that point out where you were mistaken and continue making the same arguments.

In short, I wish *you* would stop.

> Maybe these crappy ads are a downstream symptom of effective user privacy?

No, they are just a bit late on that 'doing what everyone else is doing' train.

@Plume, Wouldn’t it be more efficient for you to just mail a bomb to Apple?

What?

@Someone else: Way to prove that you are just insane.

"No, they are just a bit late on that 'doing what everyone else is doing' train."

As per usual.

The slow Xerox machine in Cupertino strikes again.

@Someone Else
Wow you went from 1 to 100 at the speed of light. Why are you suggesting mailing a bomb to Apple? That’s insane

As a firm believer in The Serenity Prayer, I use the Sharing Extension in Apple News to send articles to Readwise, where I can serenely read the ad-stripped text (or even have it go text-to-audio so I can listen to long-form stuff in my car).

Alas, this doesn't work on the MacOS version of Apple News, but it does work on the iOS and iPadOS versions.

"I’ve switched from News to Kagi News"

I've actually found a use for OpenClaw. I've given my bot about a hundred RSS feeds. It reads them every two hours during the daytime, picks ten stories it finds relevant, puts them in a list, adds some of its own commentary, and sends the list to me by WhatsApp.

I'm still also checking out Kagi News and some other sources, but it's an interesting experiment. It sometimes shows me stories I don't see anywhere else.

I've told it to give a cynical take on stories if it thinks it's appropriate, which I find helpful for calibrating my own opinion (when news agencies breathlessly report on some new study, OpenClaw points out that it's just one unreplicated study, for example).

@Someone else

I think there’s a causative relationship between blocking personalized ads, increased user privacy, and the crappy ads folks get on Apple News.

I tried turning on personalized ads a few days ago when you suggested it. I do get some of those nice ads that you mention (which I also got before), but I’m also still getting the same crappy ones as before.

@Michael,

Another data point: I hadn’t gotten any ‘high quality’ ads for months until I turned on personalized ads, only crappy ones.

After turning it on, as I said above, I got ads with recognizable brands.

Unfortunately for me, after turning personalized ads back off, I’m still getting some medium-quality ads with accurate targeting. Not the big brands, but medium-sized company ones, in addition to the usual crappy ads. This is the case even a couple days later, so it feels there’s some residual personalization going on that I hope goes away soon and I’m 100% crappy ads again.