After Cambridge Analytica scandal, publishers see Apple News as a solid alternative to bei...

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  • Reply 41 of 61
    fmalloyfmalloy Posts: 105member
    I'm underwhelmed with Apple News. It still shows me articles from news sources I'm not interested in, and I have no idea how to exclude them. This is not a political manifesto, but let's just say the delivered content has a certain political slant. Using "Dislike Story" hasn't seem to have made any noticeable changes in the content delivered.
    SpamSandwich
  • Reply 42 of 61
    StrangeDaysStrangeDays Posts: 12,834member
    gatorguy said:
    gatorguy said:
    adm1 said:
    I wonder when the day will come that the people PAYING for the advertisements realise it's not working? Do ads really work on anyone, I may be in a minority but other than rarely making me aware of something new I didn't know about, adverts (TV, radio, internet, magazine etc.) have never directly resulted in me making a purchase, big nor small.
    Apparently they work since nearly every retailer, product maker, car dealer, technology company (yup Apple), restaurant, movie and TV producer and service provider uses them. Ads have proven their value over centuries.

    As for you personally I suspect some Apple ad contributed to your interest unless you simply knee-jerk purchase anything with the Apple logo on it. 
    Nice dig there, google dude. 

    Nah. Most of the techies here on AI don't rely on Apple ads to make up our minds on buying Apple gear. I'd wager most techies do a bunch of researching/reading about the gear and use that for their decision making, not the 15-second spots on TV which are designed for the mass market "normals". 
    I agree most long time techie fans on an Apple fan site wouldn't. But the OP already graciously and politely answered me so your interpretation of his thought process isn't particularly insightful. 
    I’ve submitted no such interpretation of his thought process, and instead only commented on how techies operate since you don’t seem to know any — as proven by your absurd fallacy of false dichotomy (your claim that it’s either ads, or knee-jerk brand loyalty. utter nonsense, of course. what a silly thing to think let alone claim). 
  • Reply 43 of 61
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    fmalloy said:
    I'm underwhelmed with Apple News. It still shows me articles from news sources I'm not interested in, and I have no idea how to exclude them. This is not a political manifesto, but let's just say the delivered content has a certain political slant. Using "Dislike Story" hasn't seem to have made any noticeable changes in the content delivered.
    Indeed. Just using Google’s News feed on the web was a raging trash fire of coverage that was horribly biased and of no value to me. Even after I found how to curate the feed the biggest offenders still manage to show up. All news is inherently biased because people are inherently biased.
  • Reply 44 of 61
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member
    gatorguy said:
    gatorguy said:
    adm1 said:
    I wonder when the day will come that the people PAYING for the advertisements realise it's not working? Do ads really work on anyone, I may be in a minority but other than rarely making me aware of something new I didn't know about, adverts (TV, radio, internet, magazine etc.) have never directly resulted in me making a purchase, big nor small.
    Apparently they work since nearly every retailer, product maker, car dealer, technology company (yup Apple), restaurant, movie and TV producer and service provider uses them. Ads have proven their value over centuries.

    As for you personally I suspect some Apple ad contributed to your interest unless you simply knee-jerk purchase anything with the Apple logo on it. 
    Nice dig there, google dude. 

    Nah. Most of the techies here on AI don't rely on Apple ads to make up our minds on buying Apple gear. I'd wager most techies do a bunch of researching/reading about the gear and use that for their decision making, not the 15-second spots on TV which are designed for the mass market "normals". 
    I agree most long time techie fans on an Apple fan site wouldn't. But the OP already graciously and politely answered me so your interpretation of his thought process isn't particularly insightful. 
    I’ve submitted no such interpretation of his thought process, and instead only commented on how techies operate since you don’t seem to know any... 
    Oh, you were telling me how techies operate. Thanks then. Is there some official handbook or is it more like a private club with secret handshakes and special rules? What happens if you break a rule, like buy something because it looked so good in a commercial?
    edited March 2018 singularitymuthuk_vanalingammac_128
  • Reply 45 of 61
    fallenjtfallenjt Posts: 4,053member
    A lot of fake news on Facebook made me take it as a grain of salt. I go straight to Google news, Yahoo news if I'm on computer or Apple News in iOS app.
  • Reply 46 of 61
    Ridiculous. Apple News isn't even available on the majority of the world's devices (non iOS devices) and that's not even considering that it's not even available in most countries (even Canada doesn't officially have it). 

    Apple News is NOT in a good place to take over. Any news source would be suicidal to remove itself from Google.
    muthuk_vanalingam
  • Reply 47 of 61
    bonobobbonobob Posts: 382member
    spice-boy said:
    I wish Apple News had better customize settings, for example don't want to see articles from "People" magazine, maybe I have overlooked something in the settings....
    You definitely overlooked something (but it's not in the settings).  Check out the iPhone User Guide in the iBooks store.  There's a wealth of information in there about the more obscure capabilities of your device.  And it's free included in the price of the phone.
  • Reply 48 of 61
    mattinozmattinoz Posts: 2,299member
    gatorguy said:
    adm1 said:
    I wonder when the day will come that the people PAYING for the advertisements realise it's not working? Do ads really work on anyone, I may be in a minority but other than rarely making me aware of something new I didn't know about, adverts (TV, radio, internet, magazine etc.) have never directly resulted in me making a purchase, big nor small.
    Apparently they work since nearly every retailer, product maker, car dealer, technology company (yup Apple), restaurant, movie and TV producer and service provider uses them. Ads have proven their value over centuries.

    As for you personally I suspect some Apple ad contributed to your interest unless you simply knee-jerk purchase anything with the Apple logo on it. 
    Well until you look at the revenues of media companies that rely on advertising. Certainly around here those with good ratings are sliding on the revenue. The old model of ads tied or aligned to content and targeting the audience engaged in that content should have a resurgence. To me that is the model Apple is trying to create a platform for.
  • Reply 49 of 61
    thttht Posts: 5,421member
    fmalloy said:
    I'm underwhelmed with Apple News. It still shows me articles from news sources I'm not interested in, and I have no idea how to exclude them. This is not a political manifesto, but let's just say the delivered content has a certain political slant. Using "Dislike Story" hasn't seem to have made any noticeable changes in the content delivered.
    Force touch an article in the feed, slide the pop-up, and tap the Dislike Channel button. Or, you can tap the unfollow heart for the channel in the Following page. 
    fastasleepjony0
  • Reply 50 of 61
    Why doesn’t Apple make Apple News available worldwide? I can’t get it in my country. 
  • Reply 51 of 61
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    airnerd said:
    They should be doing much shorter commercial breaks wtih shorter commercials.
    What on Earth are you doing? DON’T GIVE THEM IDEAS unless they’re ideas that WON’T work on people.
    apricot88 said:
    Why doesn’t Apple make Apple News available worldwide? I can’t get it in my country. 
    Partially because the various news sources may block their content in a given country. Partially because of licensing.
    edited March 2018 SpamSandwich
  • Reply 52 of 61
    fastasleepfastasleep Posts: 6,408member
    Pfft. The default feeds for me included BuzzFeed, Politico and various YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE IT! sites. Such high-quality content!
    /eyeroll
    BuzzFeed may have originated as something like that, but they've been doing some pretty solid deep dig reporting lately. Politico has never been clickbait title fodder. And you can customize your feed extremely heavily, so what's the problem again?
  • Reply 53 of 61
    fastasleepfastasleep Posts: 6,408member
    fmalloy said:
    I'm underwhelmed with Apple News. It still shows me articles from news sources I'm not interested in, and I have no idea how to exclude them. This is not a political manifesto, but let's just say the delivered content has a certain political slant. Using "Dislike Story" hasn't seem to have made any noticeable changes in the content delivered.
    It's pretty well documented. The more you read, and use the controls they give you to tailor your content, the better it gets. See the second link below for clear instructions on how to dislike topics and channels. I did this with sports and now see exactly zero sports articles in my news feeds.

    Use News on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

    https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202329

    Control the kinds of stories that you see in News

    https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207947#dislike

    jony0
  • Reply 54 of 61
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    Pfft. The default feeds for me included BuzzFeed, Politico and various YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE IT! sites. Such high-quality content!
    /eyeroll
    BuzzFeed may have originated as something like that, but they've been doing some pretty solid deep dig reporting lately. Politico has never been clickbait title fodder. And you can customize your feed extremely heavily, so what's the problem again?
    Please. BuzzFeed, Politico, Huffington Post, the Washington Post and the New York Times are all dumpster fires.
  • Reply 55 of 61
    sfolax said:

    270k people unwitting gave access to their data, which allowed the data of 50 million other people to be stolen. 

    How do you not get the words you are typing?


    See that's where you are wrong.

    https://www.ft.com/content/6591e21a-2ce1-11e8-a34a-7e7563b0b0f4
    Mr Kogan said on Wednesday that his interest in the data gathered from around 270,000 Facebook users paid to complete a survey, and their friends, was to better understand people’s personalities — a key area of his academic research. But by transferring the data to Cambridge Analytica for commercial use, Facebook said he breached their terms of service.

    People were paid to sign up. You don't just give your facebook details away to an app - you have to authorise it and it shows you what you are giving access to. Most people just ignore that and click Ok. There is a difference between not reading/understand and stolen. 

    If some fraud comes knocking at my door and sells me a vacuum cleaner that maps out the floor plans of my house and sends details to their server which they can use to plan various malicious exploits against me, I've willingly been duped by my own mistake. Maybe it was in the EULA I didn't read. I gave consent and access to somebody I shouldn't have, and it's my fault. 

    But if somebody comes knocking and asks me for a listing of all my neighbors and the blueprints to all of their houses in my neighborhood and I say, duh, sure here! Then guess what? All those neighbors are compromised by a mistake I made, and they didn't. They didn't give consent just because they have a dimwitted neighbor.

    The thing is, Facebook created a huge social graph using a network that purports to be a way to share pictures and read viral bits of fluff and take quizzes about what Disney princess you are. Except what it really does is spy out everything you type. And when you answer those quizzes, you frequently reveal (innocuously hidden on a page you click through) huge swaths of metadata including your friend list, enabling any bullshit bit of garbage facebookery to slurp up miles of data that nobody on the site, whether they realize it or not, knows is being collected whether they engage in such Quiz and Likes crap or not.  

    The only reason to deny all of this is if you are a complicit supporter of this kind of fraud just because it currently supports your political agenda. But guess what happens once the system and the data is available to others, such as enemy nations planning out their own sophisticated psyops attacks? In fact, the Cambridge Analytica researcher already has taken the data to Russia, where he works. Two years ago. We already know China is working on ways to inject spyware and suck up data. It would be real helpful to have a social graph of tons of data acquired from Americans (and everyone, globally) under the premise of being a fun social game site with funny videos. 

    Maybe you're okay with anyone knowing everything about you and how to launch attacks on your collective group of neighbors, but most people aren't. That's why this a scandal, and a really big deal. 


    edited March 2018 lowededwookie
  • Reply 56 of 61
    jony0jony0 Posts: 378member
    apricot88 said:
    Why doesn’t Apple make Apple News available worldwide? I can’t get it in my country. 
    Partially because the various news sources may block their content in a given country. Partially because of licensing.
    Which is always an issue of course for any content, whether for music, videos, books, news or even Apple Pay. However here in Canada we have all that content and had many publications available for Newsstand way back then before Apple News, so blocking or licensing wasn't an issue 5 years ago. I believe Apple News is only available in US, UK & AU, so this seems to be on Apple.
  • Reply 57 of 61
    mike1 said:
    gatorguy said:
    tht said:
    I use Apple News.app all the time. You can curate the topics you want to see. 
    I wouldn’t mind micropayment options on a per article basis. 
    But I suspect most folks wouldn't. Other techs from PayPal to startup Flattr to Google have tried (and Google still is) to encourage micropayments pretty much along those lines and for a few years now, but with very limited success. People don't want to open up a wallet, and publishers and their employees won't work for free. We're at a standoff. 
    If I could use my pre-loaded iTunes account, I'd definitely buy an article now and then. I'd rather that than yet another monthly subscription hitting a credit card.
    People make in-app purchases in games for as little as a dollar all the time. Articles could be priced anywhere from a quarter up to whatever the owner thinks would sell.
    GG1 said:
    I think the bigger picture isn't News, but privacy in general.

    Apple has continually promoted their stance on privacy and protection of user data. We haven't really had any major breaches at Google or Facebook that caused a large amount of personal data to be leaked, so people currently don't seem to care how much they know about you. All it takes is one major incident to get people thinking, and this Facebook issue could be a tipping point in general awareness about what companies know about you. Enough that people might start getting fed up with data mining your personal habits/tastes. Consumer backlash (and maybe even legislation) could have serious consequences for Facebook and Google, and virtually none for Apple. It would probably have the opposite effect on Apple, improving their reputation in the eyes of consumers.
    This is a big "what if", but what if Apple started a Facebook type service with their normal privacy stance in place? And open it up to anyone (just create an AppleID account).

    Then we could gauge if people are really motivated by privacy. I realize that Facebook is "sticky" if you've been there for years, so the concern for privacy needs to hit a tipping point. Have we reached that tipping point yet?
    spice-boy said:
    I wish Apple News had better customize settings, for example don't want to see articles from "People" magazine, maybe I have overlooked something in the settings....
    a) micropayments have been tried. A tip jar might work for a casual blogger trying to get in an extra beer, but does not support a news desk doing real journalism work. If it did, we'd be seeing success and expansion of single track sales (which did work a bit in iTunes, although being far less lucrative that the old CD model. Thing was, that model was dead. So 99 cent tracks were more money than free Napster rips).

    b) I described what an Apple social network could look like. Rather than being viral and anonymous, it could be more like the blogging or music world, where you could find original content associated with a real person and follow it and even subscribe. Without content being ripped off, repurposed, reslanted, overwhelmed with troll comments, etc. I linked to that article in the piece: social networking https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/03/19/editorial-an-ad-free-premium-social-network-from-apple

    c) You should be able to shape what sources you want to see by Disliking, just like Apple Music. Although perhaps this doesn't always work (also like dislikes in Apple Music).
  • Reply 58 of 61
    Dracarys said:
    Ridiculous. Apple News isn't even available on the majority of the world's devices (non iOS devices) and that's not even considering that it's not even available in most countries (even Canada doesn't officially have it). 

    Apple News is NOT in a good place to take over. Any news source would be suicidal to remove itself from Google.
    The only publishers who care about volumes rather than revenues are propaganda and fake news sites. Everyone else wants to target the demographics of iOS, which as the piece noted, is where subscription revenues are being realized.  

    Apple News is just over 2 years old, so to think it's not going to ever reach beyond the US, UK and Australia is a bit premature.
  • Reply 59 of 61
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    BuzzFeed may have originated as something like that, but they've been doing some pretty solid deep dig reporting lately. Politico has never been clickbait title fodder.
    That’s my laugh for today. Thanks.
    SpamSandwich
  • Reply 60 of 61
    Dracarys said:
    Ridiculous. Apple News isn't even available on the majority of the world's devices (non iOS devices) and that's not even considering that it's not even available in most countries (even Canada doesn't officially have it). 

    Apple News is NOT in a good place to take over. Any news source would be suicidal to remove itself from Google.
    The only publishers who care about volumes rather than revenues are propaganda and fake news sites. Everyone else wants to target the demographics of iOS, which as the piece noted, is where subscription revenues are being realized.  

    Apple News is just over 2 years old, so to think it's not going to ever reach beyond the US, UK and Australia is a bit premature.
    It’s still possible that it won’t though. How old is iTunes TV Shows and yet still not available here in NZ.

    The thing is it’s not Apple’s fault for this it’s the incumbent media organisations that are the problem. Here in NZ it’s TVNZ, Three, Sky ( the biggest culprit and rip off of them all), Stuff, NZ Herald, and Mediaworks
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