| ▲ | Groxx 3 days ago |
| I'm fond of the ones with a fake close button, so tapping it just launches the ad's site. Instant uninstall and 1-star. (Yes, I know it's mostly the ad's fault, but there's no practical way to punish them directly. So force apps to pick better-behaving networks.) |
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| ▲ | DrewADesign 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| As a sometimes designer, i don’t think there’s any distinction between punishing the ad and the company. The company bought the ad, probably directed its creation, and decided what its criteria was for success. 1-star away as far as I’m concerned. |
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| ▲ | josephg 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I feel the same way about newsletters. “Hey you bought socks that one time! Want more socks??” -> Unsubscribe. “Hey it’s your weekly sock news! What’s new in socks!” -> But I unsubscribed! Haha no, you only unsubscribed from the “product releases” list. Not the “weekly news” list or our 10 other fabulous mailing lists! -> Report all emails from this domain as spam. May god have mercy on your soul, cute socks. | | |
| ▲ | rkomorn 2 days ago | parent [-] | | This is exactly something I hate about the current state of things. Interacting with a company/organization immediately turns into a lifelong "legitimate relationship" that supposedly entitles them to contact you forever and ever. | | |
| ▲ | jdwithit 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I "love" the ones that randomly decide to reactivate literally years after unsubscribing and never interacting with the business again. The other day I randomly got an email from a yoga studio I once bought my wife a gift card from. We moved and neither of us has been there since 2021. Why on earth am I suddenly getting spam 5 years later. I get similar messages from hotels many years later too. Sometimes ones I didn't even end up staying at, just browsed. You can sense the desperation through the monitor. | | |
| ▲ | hylaride 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I now militantly use apple’s “hide my email” function for this reason, though it doesn’t really work when you “need” to give your email address in person (I have a “junk” email address that’s normally turned off on my devices for those people) |
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| ▲ | brewtide 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Recently bought a GE oven. It had a minor problem and had a few service appointments. Not a huge deal, life moves on. Meanwhile, near immediately, they would love a review! They want Participation in OUR new oven. It's overwhelming, and most frustrating is it seems 'communication' is rapidly become a one way st. |
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| ▲ | nemomarx 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think they mean they leave a 1 star review on the app that was displaying the ad, who probably didn't directly do any of that. They did work with a bad ad network though so it's a valid enough reason to complain imo. | | |
| ▲ | DrewADesign 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, good call, but I honestly have no problem with that 1-star either. They can’t say “well we just opened the garbage conduit and pointed it at your face… we didn’t actually MAKE the garbage.” Those ads are part of their app experience, now. They published it, so they’re ’re responsible for it. If it sucks I give it a sucky rating. | | |
| ▲ | Groxx 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Yep. There's no other way to maybe-convince them to get a different ad provider, because they're the ones that chose it (probably because it paid the most). |
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| ▲ | flexagoon 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is usually against ad network rules, so if you're willing to go out of your way a bit, you can screenshot those ads and report directly to the ad network |
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| ▲ | Groxx a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Which is often not possible because clicking an ad generally closes the ad. And there's no incentive for users to report, by design IMO. They could have a separate ad-reporting UI in every ad-running app (so you can report stuff later), and they could reward valid reports by skipping all ads on their network for a month or something, but doing that would reduce fraud, and that means reducing their profit. So none of them do it. I'd say they probably need an oversight committee with teeth, to strongly punish every single violation (so the networks develop functional defenses), but they'll probably just VW-emissions-fraud their way around it. | |
| ▲ | kaoD 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | QA is something an employee should do, not me. | |
| ▲ | kotaKat 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Difficulty is when you don't know what ad network it is, the app hides the ad network they use, and refuse to disclose who it is. You got served an ad from "one of our partners". That's all you'll get to know, and there's no mechanism to even report the app's shitty behavior to Google or Apple (and they don't care when the app becomes too large, either). |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm not sure that is mostly the ad's fault. Hitting a target on a touchscreen is hard to do. This seems like it's the phone's fault first to me. (If you're using a mouse, forget what I said. But I haven't run into an ad where the close button didn't close it... if you were able to click the close button.) |
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| ▲ | immibis 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| IME it's a real close button but the ad opens the thing when it closes, regardless of how it closes. |
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| ▲ | Groxx 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | No, I mean there are ads with a "close button" in the corner, and then a few seconds later the real close button will appear and it'll weirdly overlap it. Because the first one was fake, just part of the image asset of the ad. They're very very clearly click-fraud tricks, and most platforms will ban them if they're caught. But by clicking on the ad, it closes the ad, and there's no way to go back and report them, nor incentive for ad-viewers to do so. By design, IMO. The whole industry runs on scams like this, there's no incentive for large platforms to proactively block any of them because they lead to money moving through them, where they can extract their rent. They only move against the most egregious, to keep fraud at the same barely-acceptable level as all the others. | | |
| ▲ | mbirth 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > The whole industry runs on scams like this Wasn’t there an article here a few days ago about Facebook specialising in hiding such malicious ads from testers and law enforcement to maximise gains? | | |
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| ▲ | jordwest 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | A common trick is that the first click on the X will go to the ad, but if you return and click the X again it will close, gaslighting you into thinking you just misclicked the first time. Another trick that I’ve noticed on the Reddit app is that the tappable area is much larger for ads than normal posts. If you tap even near the ad it will visit the ad | | |
| ▲ | DrewADesign 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Also making the hit area smaller than the close graphic itself is a popular one. |
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