This website is the absolute worst, by far, that I visit regularly in terms of loading speed and annoying loading refreshes. It's ok to pontificate, but I don't see any suggestions from you on how to improve AI's worst in class performance.
I don't experience poor performance and I have nothing to do with the site running nor development. The forum runs on the Huddler platform (see link at the bottom of the page), which is outsourced development. Ad content can be made to load asynchronously if it isn't already but media-heavy ad content is memory intensive and will slow page loading. For me, pages tend to load in under 4 seconds. AI does seem to be loading a largish 370k Javascript files here, which might be a bit heavy for mobile CPUs to handle:
One thing I found on loading the forum rather than the main page was it loaded over 4MB vs ~1MB and in Safari's inspector, the following tiny image showed up as 3.5MB, if you drag it to the Finder you can see the size of it, that should be about 1/1000th the size:
That kind of thing that will slow down page loading and will burn through data allowances. I'm not sure who deals with things like that and I'm not sure how you even make a 70 pixel square JPEG come out that large. On mobile devices, this kind of thing would have more of an effect.
I don't see how this is Apple's responsibility. For everything stated in this article, it is also true that most of the comments are accurate. These companies DO create seriously agitating, nuisance ads, and they track without permission in any way they can.
Every time I search some random thing on Google and then show up to Apple Insider, I see the same images of that thing flooding every single ad in sight on the pages of AI for the next week.
Do you think the average consumer doesn't put it all together?
I don't give a rat's ass, frankly.
My job as a consumer is not to figure out how you can make money selling shit to me.
Thats your job. Start thinking different or stop working in this field. Adapt or die. Make room for the next guy.
This is the first article I've seen on iOS9 ad blocking that brings up iAd, which is the question I've been wondering about. Does Apple allow ad blocking to blocks even iAd, or is iAd immune to blocking. It seems as though Apple would have the capability for the latter. That seems like an agreeable compromise too - iAd becomes effectively the only way to advertise on iOS. Apple gets strong control over advertising formats - I trust them to stop the worst advertising abuses. Publishers still have an option to reasonably advertise on iOS to earn an income. Competitors to iAd would get strangled, but I don't really care. Most of them are creepy anyway and I'd prefer they be gone. Especially when it comes to the "kick out" ads that send you into the ap store as cited by Lord Amhran above - those are justification for going full nuclear on advertisers.
To be honest I don't block ads here at ai because there ads are not intrusive and non offensive. I do not block anything unless it becomes an irritant to me. I find a lot of ads on websites that push porn and trashy entertainment sites that are nothing but a guise for porno sites to be offensive and I will block these. I think a huge amount of the responcibility for what kinds of ads a website puts up lies with the management of that site. It also says a lot about about how a website wants to be perceived in the public eye, either as a professional publication or a yellow sheet rag. I don't block all websites ads but some I do because they have absolutely no consideration for me as a reader.
I'd be willing to pay a modest subscription fee for AppleInsider news if it would change its bad habits. I check it just about every day to see what the daily hubbub is. On my desktop, the site occasionally appears to hang after loading all the ads, with the content area blank until I force a reload. Pain in the keister.
If an online publisher could get some people to pony up and pay while also cutting down on intrusive ads, data hogging ads, tracking ads, content-blocking ads; they could just carry on without losing out. Up the quality of the reporting, limit ads to good players/payers and you'll see even greater subscriptions.
[QUOTE]...anyone who believes they are entitled to simply block ads across the board and deprive publications and their staff of advertising revenue and their very livelihood is flat-out wrong.[/QUOTE]
This is categorically false. I'm paying for my data connection. I have the absolute right to decide what content I do and do not want delivered through it.
It's not just the ads themselves, my major objection is the tracking.
An ad that simply displays and only reports that I clicked the ad from the site displaying the ad is acceptable. What is not acceptable is the tracking, sharing, and targeting based on my clicks, website visits, and interests. Building a shared, unapproved-by-me database of my browsing habits, interests, and searches is NOT acceptable.
Until the tracking and profiling stops, I will use adblockers, ghostery, and maxa cookie manager on all my computers and mobiles devices.
This is categorically false. I'm paying for my data connection. I have the absolute right to decide what content I do and do not want delivered through it.
This is the first article I've seen on iOS9 ad blocking that brings up iAd, which is the question I've been wondering about. Does Apple allow ad blocking to blocks even iAd, or is iAd immune to blocking. It seems as though Apple would have the capability for the latter. That seems like an agreeable compromise too - iAd becomes effectively the only way to advertise on iOS. Apple gets strong control over advertising formats - I trust them to stop the worst advertising abuses. Publishers still have an option to reasonably advertise on iOS to earn an income. Competitors to iAd would get strangled, but I don't really care. Most of them are creepy anyway and I'd prefer they be gone. Especially when it comes to the "kick out" ads that send you into the ap store as cited by Lord Amhran above - those are justification for going full nuclear on advertisers.
Good question.
And if implementing an iAd only system is deemed too exclusive, what about some sort of Ad Community Association that has a binding code of conduct that would let people trust what they're serving. A publication could let it be known that the only ads that they serve are from members and it would include some sort of page view max quota, such as 1 or 2, based on screen size.
Online publishers and their free with ads business model killed newspaper and magazine publishers. Now ad blocking is threatening your business model. By "you" I mean every one bitching about ad blockers. What goes around comes around.
And yet I don’t respect him one iota, nor is someone who destroys something good like this “conscientious” at all.
Sorry, but no.
In other words, you know nothing about him, and you're the sort of person who only values that which benefits himself, in the present moment, and with no regard for others.
Anyone can agree that some mobile ads are exceptionally egregious and must be kept in check. But anyone who believes they are entitled to simply block ads across the board and deprive publications and their staff of advertising revenue and their very livelihood is flat-out wrong.
That's like saying I'm morally obligated not to get up to use the bathroom during a commercial break of a network TV show.
That got me to thinking. I'm usually not too concerned about tracking because I don't ever experience any harm from an ad on my computer. What I just now thought of is on AI forums the thumbs up icon is gray if you have posted so theoretically a tracker, using JS, could find the username of the person, then visit their profile page and glean additional information. A bot then could also search your entire post history.
That's not theoretical, that's reality. Whatever social behavior you exhibit online - forums, Twitter, Facebook, anything - is being collated against some type of identifier of you, the person, and also matched with your real world behavior. Profiling of consumers is getting easier and easier. That loyalty card you use with your associated email address? That ties your online identify and behavior to your offline. Combine that with the increasing prevalence of physically tracking you. When you walk into a lot of stores, they are capturing any unique identifier from your phone just by having your wireless turned on. I believe Apple instituted faux MAC addresses on wifi just to reduce this issue. And we don't even know what the mobile operators are sharing.
It's entirely possible to criticize a person's actions but not the person. You should consider it.
The person chose to undertake the actions. The actions were undertaken due to a number of the other actions or beliefs that make up the person. The person can change, but until he does, the person is to blame. Who are we but our beliefs and the actions undertaken in accordance therewith?
This feels like the same thing as the Flappy Bird guy pulling his product, except there’s zero chance that some competitor or other field-associated group would have approached him to do so.
Comments
I don't experience poor performance and I have nothing to do with the site running nor development. The forum runs on the Huddler platform (see link at the bottom of the page), which is outsourced development. Ad content can be made to load asynchronously if it isn't already but media-heavy ad content is memory intensive and will slow page loading. For me, pages tend to load in under 4 seconds. AI does seem to be loading a largish 370k Javascript files here, which might be a bit heavy for mobile CPUs to handle:
http://photos2.appleinsider.com/v9/js/header-scripts-concat.js?1.03g
One thing I found on loading the forum rather than the main page was it loaded over 4MB vs ~1MB and in Safari's inspector, the following tiny image showed up as 3.5MB, if you drag it to the Finder you can see the size of it, that should be about 1/1000th the size:
http://forums-cdn.appleinsider.com/f/f4/70x70px-ZC-f4c9c066_1275818098_iPhone5White.jpeg
That kind of thing that will slow down page loading and will burn through data allowances. I'm not sure who deals with things like that and I'm not sure how you even make a 70 pixel square JPEG come out that large. On mobile devices, this kind of thing would have more of an effect.
I don't see how this is Apple's responsibility. For everything stated in this article, it is also true that most of the comments are accurate. These companies DO create seriously agitating, nuisance ads, and they track without permission in any way they can.
Every time I search some random thing on Google and then show up to Apple Insider, I see the same images of that thing flooding every single ad in sight on the pages of AI for the next week.
Do you think the average consumer doesn't put it all together?
I don't give a rat's ass, frankly.
My job as a consumer is not to figure out how you can make money selling shit to me.
Thats your job. Start thinking different or stop working in this field. Adapt or die. Make room for the next guy.
I'd be willing to pay a modest subscription fee for AppleInsider news if it would change its bad habits. I check it just about every day to see what the daily hubbub is. On my desktop, the site occasionally appears to hang after loading all the ads, with the content area blank until I force a reload. Pain in the keister.
If an online publisher could get some people to pony up and pay while also cutting down on intrusive ads, data hogging ads, tracking ads, content-blocking ads; they could just carry on without losing out. Up the quality of the reporting, limit ads to good players/payers and you'll see even greater subscriptions.
This is categorically false. I'm paying for my data connection. I have the absolute right to decide what content I do and do not want delivered through it.
An ad that simply displays and only reports that I clicked the ad from the site displaying the ad is acceptable. What is not acceptable is the tracking, sharing, and targeting based on my clicks, website visits, and interests. Building a shared, unapproved-by-me database of my browsing habits, interests, and searches is NOT acceptable.
Until the tracking and profiling stops, I will use adblockers, ghostery, and maxa cookie manager on all my computers and mobiles devices.
This is categorically false. I'm paying for my data connection. I have the absolute right to decide what content I do and do not want delivered through it.
HEAR, HEAR
This is the first article I've seen on iOS9 ad blocking that brings up iAd, which is the question I've been wondering about. Does Apple allow ad blocking to blocks even iAd, or is iAd immune to blocking. It seems as though Apple would have the capability for the latter. That seems like an agreeable compromise too - iAd becomes effectively the only way to advertise on iOS. Apple gets strong control over advertising formats - I trust them to stop the worst advertising abuses. Publishers still have an option to reasonably advertise on iOS to earn an income. Competitors to iAd would get strangled, but I don't really care. Most of them are creepy anyway and I'd prefer they be gone. Especially when it comes to the "kick out" ads that send you into the ap store as cited by Lord Amhran above - those are justification for going full nuclear on advertisers.
Good question.
And if implementing an iAd only system is deemed too exclusive, what about some sort of Ad Community Association that has a binding code of conduct that would let people trust what they're serving. A publication could let it be known that the only ads that they serve are from members and it would include some sort of page view max quota, such as 1 or 2, based on screen size.
[IMG ALT=""]http://forums.appleinsider.com/content/type/61/id/63069/width/800/height/700[/IMG]
In other words, you know nothing about him, and you're the sort of person who only values that which benefits himself, in the present moment, and with no regard for others.
Congrats, you're a shitty person.
Enjoy your delusions.
That's like saying I'm morally obligated not to get up to use the bathroom during a commercial break of a network TV show.
Can you summarize the results on that page for us?
That got me to thinking. I'm usually not too concerned about tracking because I don't ever experience any harm from an ad on my computer. What I just now thought of is on AI forums the thumbs up icon is gray if you have posted so theoretically a tracker, using JS, could find the username of the person, then visit their profile page and glean additional information. A bot then could also search your entire post history.
That's not theoretical, that's reality. Whatever social behavior you exhibit online - forums, Twitter, Facebook, anything - is being collated against some type of identifier of you, the person, and also matched with your real world behavior. Profiling of consumers is getting easier and easier. That loyalty card you use with your associated email address? That ties your online identify and behavior to your offline. Combine that with the increasing prevalence of physically tracking you. When you walk into a lot of stores, they are capturing any unique identifier from your phone just by having your wireless turned on. I believe Apple instituted faux MAC addresses on wifi just to reduce this issue. And we don't even know what the mobile operators are sharing.
I never use my real info on a loyalty card. It always surprises me when people do.
Enjoy your delusions.
It's entirely possible to criticize a person's actions but not the person. You should consider it.
The person chose to undertake the actions. The actions were undertaken due to a number of the other actions or beliefs that make up the person. The person can change, but until he does, the person is to blame. Who are we but our beliefs and the actions undertaken in accordance therewith?
This feels like the same thing as the Flappy Bird guy pulling his product, except there’s zero chance that some competitor or other field-associated group would have approached him to do so.
Pulling a content blocker is suspect.