A lot of sites are essentially unreadable. There are things flashing at you, videos that autoplay, and the page will reload every 30 seconds and you lose your place.
And even if ads are respectful of user experience, there is a cognitive load to having the content you want to consume bombarded with unrelated content, especially when it’s trying to manipulate your emotions in some way.
Site owners don’t have a right to complain about people using ad blockers because their insistence on money over user experience is the reason everyone is installing them.
A lot of the time I just read sites in Reader Mode. There are no ads or distractions and it seems that site owners haven’t figured out how to block or detect it yet.
nehal3m 7 minutes ago [-]
I see some tenuous connection between advertising and extinction of our species. It goes something like:
One: Human psychology tends to ascribe more weight to negative things than positive things in the short term. In the long term this generally balances out, but in the short term it's more prudent in a biological sense to pay attention to the rustling in the bushes than the berries you might pick from them. This is known as the [negativity bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias).
Two: The modern gatekeepers of social interaction, Big Tech, employ blind algorithms that attempt to steer your attention towards spending more time on their platforms. These companies are the arbiters of the content we experience daily and what you do and don't see is mostly at their discretion. The techniques they employ, in simple terms, are designed to provoke what they call 'engagement'. They do this because at the end of the day FAANG have not only a financial interest, but a fiduciary duty to sell advertisements at the behest of their shareholders. The more they can engage you, the more ads they can sell. They employ live A-B testing, divide people into cohorts and poke and prod them with psychological techniques to try and glue your eyeballs to their ads.
Extrapolated conclusion:
These companies have a financial and legally binding interest to divide the population against itself, obstructing politics and social interaction to the point where we might not be able to achieve any of the goals that we need to reach to prevent oblivion.
lesuorac 18 minutes ago [-]
I will point out at no point in the article does he complain about seeing advertisements for golfing tees in his Golf magazine subscription.
IMO, the real problems with ads are
1) They just aren't relevant to you. No I'm not going to start drinking AG1 ...
2) There's no information about the product. How do I even know if AG1 is a good idea?
Rygian 10 minutes ago [-]
Ads not only need to be relevant to me. They also have to be presented to me only when I am interested in the category of the advertised product or service. Otherwise they're just spam.
(Consider the typical "you just bought a new fridge, so let's show you ads of fridges".)
nickff 14 minutes ago [-]
I agree with you, and think that despite all the hype about targeting and data mining, platforms like YouTube are horrible at determining people’s interests. Re-targeting does seem to ‘work’ better, but it is also extremely wasteful because many of the people seeing the ads have already made their purchase decision.
iterance 13 minutes ago [-]
Lord Dunsany, 1915, wrote "WHAT WE HAVE COME TO":
When the advertiser saw the cathedral spires over the downs in the distance, he looked at them and wept.
"If only," he said, "this were an advertisement of Beefo, so nice, so nutritious, try it in your soup, ladies like it."
MyMemoryfails 52 minutes ago [-]
Same, for same reason i refuse pay for services, in past paying for service would mean they wouldn't track you and sell your data, but thats not longer the case. Since that's additional profits for companies.
Luckily there's few exemptions services which im happily paying since its proven they dont collect your data so advertisers can't prey on you when you're at lowest.
Like did you know, just by obtaining credit card, your shopping history is sold? And you can't reject this, at least i haven't managed to do so. Yet in EU we're banning cash, where's option so i can buy my grocies without insurances knowing i bought candies for weekends so they'll hike insurance up.
bediger4000 44 minutes ago [-]
Advertisers end up corrupting ad supported media, too. Before ads, Google keyword search was ok. After ads, it decayed, because catering to advertisers was how they got payed.
It looks like ads will corrupt our only hope, AI.
Rendered at 16:30:28 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
And even if ads are respectful of user experience, there is a cognitive load to having the content you want to consume bombarded with unrelated content, especially when it’s trying to manipulate your emotions in some way.
Site owners don’t have a right to complain about people using ad blockers because their insistence on money over user experience is the reason everyone is installing them.
A lot of the time I just read sites in Reader Mode. There are no ads or distractions and it seems that site owners haven’t figured out how to block or detect it yet.
One: Human psychology tends to ascribe more weight to negative things than positive things in the short term. In the long term this generally balances out, but in the short term it's more prudent in a biological sense to pay attention to the rustling in the bushes than the berries you might pick from them. This is known as the [negativity bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias).
Two: The modern gatekeepers of social interaction, Big Tech, employ blind algorithms that attempt to steer your attention towards spending more time on their platforms. These companies are the arbiters of the content we experience daily and what you do and don't see is mostly at their discretion. The techniques they employ, in simple terms, are designed to provoke what they call 'engagement'. They do this because at the end of the day FAANG have not only a financial interest, but a fiduciary duty to sell advertisements at the behest of their shareholders. The more they can engage you, the more ads they can sell. They employ live A-B testing, divide people into cohorts and poke and prod them with psychological techniques to try and glue your eyeballs to their ads.
Extrapolated conclusion: These companies have a financial and legally binding interest to divide the population against itself, obstructing politics and social interaction to the point where we might not be able to achieve any of the goals that we need to reach to prevent oblivion.
IMO, the real problems with ads are
1) They just aren't relevant to you. No I'm not going to start drinking AG1 ...
2) There's no information about the product. How do I even know if AG1 is a good idea?
(Consider the typical "you just bought a new fridge, so let's show you ads of fridges".)
When the advertiser saw the cathedral spires over the downs in the distance, he looked at them and wept.
"If only," he said, "this were an advertisement of Beefo, so nice, so nutritious, try it in your soup, ladies like it."
Luckily there's few exemptions services which im happily paying since its proven they dont collect your data so advertisers can't prey on you when you're at lowest.
Like did you know, just by obtaining credit card, your shopping history is sold? And you can't reject this, at least i haven't managed to do so. Yet in EU we're banning cash, where's option so i can buy my grocies without insurances knowing i bought candies for weekends so they'll hike insurance up.
It looks like ads will corrupt our only hope, AI.