I agree. I've written about advertisements before in my personal blog, and I never thought about the optics of someone who suffers from sensitivity to noise and movement. I myself block ads...
Exemplary
I agree. I've written about advertisements before in my personal blog, and I never thought about the optics of someone who suffers from sensitivity to noise and movement.
I myself block ads because they make pages unbearably difficult to read, with all the moving imagery on top of the actual text, massive ads popping in while you're reading, ads in the middle of text, and so on. I don't have a problem with static, tasteful ads, but these are harder and harder to come by.
Which brings me to my second point: ads should be dumb, they should be static. They should be based on the content you're viewing, so say, if I'm reading an article about how to change a cam belt on an old Lancer Evo, I expect ads for mechanics, new cars, so on. But no, ads take an invasive, borderline scary approach to try and "predict" what you like, and this has horrid effects.
I have family members who are not always on top mood, and getting ads that try and amplify that feeling of "you're not good enough" to try and sell them a solution is frankly abhorrent. Besides, one of my coworkers has a story about a friend that was pregnant, her parents didn't know it yet, but because of traffic on the family computer, they started seeing ads that gave it all away. This is, all things considered, not even the worst case. There are people who are prone to gambling, political extremism, etc.
And this takes me to yet another massive issue: ads are manipulative. They try and make you feel inadequate, they use every psychological trick to convince you to buy something you don't need or change your mind. So when you get that combination of being constantly watched, with the knowledge that someone is trying to find a gap in your head to trick you at every conceivable moment, it feels rather unnerving, it has a toll on you if you think too long about it.
What happens if you subconsciously tune out of thinking about it too long? Then you start skimming through content, you start blocking out what is perceived as "noise", it gets harder to immerse yourself in content or take something particularly seriously. If I'm reading an article about a delicate recent event, I don't want my reading of the article to be disturbed by videos of people having a party.
Ads nowadays don't seem to try to sell a product, they try to sell you a lifestyle, a mentality. It's no longer about cars, a cruise, or a mortgage, it's about a message that at the end of the day, compels you to consume more. Something among the lines of "you've failed at life, but you can make it up by buying fancy tat", "you're going to die eventually, why haven't you treated yourself?"
I am fully aware that I might be a downer with regards to ads, but I simply cannot stand modern ads anymore. They're an attack on my senses, and I'm glad this article exists to shine some lights on issues that I failed to perceive beforehand.
(Sorry for snooping around your blog, but congratulations on the marriage!)
I'm not sure that it was ever not about that. The style and form have certainly changed, but I think it's always been about selling that lifestyle angle. If advertising was "honest", it would just...
It's no longer about cars, a cruise, or a mortgage, it's about a message that at the end of the day, compels you to consume more. Something among the lines of "you've failed at life, but you can make it up by buying fancy tat", "you're going to die eventually, why haven't you treated yourself?"
I'm not sure that it was ever not about that. The style and form have certainly changed, but I think it's always been about selling that lifestyle angle. If advertising was "honest", it would just be "hey, this thing exists, just FYI, in case you need it later". Instead advertising has always been about telling why you need this product. How your life is flawed, less than optimal, and inadequate without this product. Look at all these other people who have this product living their best life! Don't you want to be like them?
The messaging style changes with the zietgeist, but the basic mechanics being employed are older than men with wooden wagons selling literal snake oil.
This is what I try to do. I'm always honest when I'm promoting something I did, to excruciating detail. It's a bit different on social media, but yeah. I've never liked the manipulative,...
If advertising was "honest", it would just be "hey, this thing exists, just FYI, in case you need it later".
This is what I try to do. I'm always honest when I'm promoting something I did, to excruciating detail. It's a bit different on social media, but yeah.
I've never liked the manipulative, psychological angle of marketing. That's really what it comes down to. It's a knee-deep science to tap into someone's weaknesses, to sell something that is perceived as "important" but truly isn't. As a result, everything is noise.
Yeah. Ad blockers make the overall experience better. Full screen ads on mobile that take directly you to play store. Video ads that start on high volume and full HD resolution. Ads on news...
Yeah. Ad blockers make the overall experience better. Full screen ads on mobile that take directly you to play store. Video ads that start on high volume and full HD resolution. Ads on news website disguised as real news. Websites that ask for notification access and then show ads in notifications. No more.
It is kind of sad how much in the world economy is revolved around ads. Especially in tech. We have thousands of brilliant engineers working for companies like Facebook or Google, but at the end...
It is kind of sad how much in the world economy is revolved around ads. Especially in tech. We have thousands of brilliant engineers working for companies like Facebook or Google, but at the end of the day all their skills and knowledge are ultimately used with the goal of optimizing ads. Sure it produces some other useful tech in its wake, but their ultimate goal is not to make a good product for consumers but for advertisers.
I don't mind paying for services to get them ad free but it is still impossible to avoid in some cases. I pay obscene amounts of money for a sports streaming service. I know sports rights are expensive so I can suck that up, but I still get shown countless ads for gambling sites that are clearly aimed at addicts or creating new ones.
Watching premier league always felt so weird with how over the top gambling advertising is there, but now it's the same in the US and more aggressive in some ways. I like placing a small bet now...
I pay obscene amounts of money for a sports streaming service. I know sports rights are expensive so I can suck that up, but I still get shown countless ads for gambling sites that are clearly aimed at addicts or creating new ones.
Watching premier league always felt so weird with how over the top gambling advertising is there, but now it's the same in the US and more aggressive in some ways. I like placing a small bet now and then, it's just so quickly permeated American sports, down to the commentary teams reading promos for draftkings, fan duel, etc. We went from 0 to 100 really quick - MLB/NHL and NBA had (have?) equity stakes in draftkings and fan duel respectively.
I just did a major overhaul to "de-ad" my home network as much as possible: piHole on the network, SmartTube on the TV, Ublock + Privacy Badger + SponsorBlock + DeArrow on my PC and the kids'...
I just did a major overhaul to "de-ad" my home network as much as possible: piHole on the network, SmartTube on the TV, Ublock + Privacy Badger + SponsorBlock + DeArrow on my PC and the kids' computers. And I have a VPN with built-in adblocking and all kinds of spoofing too, if needed.
I get it: we can't have stuff for free. Ads pay the bills. Creators need to eat. Alphabet execs need their luxury vacations. My problem is not with ads as a concept, but with the horrible intrusive, cringy mess that online ads and clickbait have become.
I'm about to implement piHole on my home network and have the hardware on my list but holy smokes this might be a little out of my realm of expertise. Even with youtube this is pretty...
I'm about to implement piHole on my home network and have the hardware on my list but holy smokes this might be a little out of my realm of expertise. Even with youtube this is pretty intimidating. Most tutorials I've seen assume the viewer already has a basic working knowledge of pi/home networking so they jump straight into it and I'm like "oh god either he skipped about 24 steps or I am completely lost here". Don't get me wrong, I'm fine following most tutorials but with this stuff I feel like an idiot. "Ladies and Gentleman of the jury, I'm just a Caveman. I fell in some ice and later got thawed out by your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me!"
If anyone has any resources for this (specifically piHole for blocking ads on a home network) "for dummies" I'd be forever grateful.
You mentioned that you are using youtube to watch videos about pihole. By the way, pihole does not block any ads within youtube. It only blocks ads that come from a different domain than the...
You mentioned that you are using youtube to watch videos about pihole.
By the way, pihole does not block any ads within youtube. It only blocks ads that come from a different domain than the initial request. All of youtube's ads are proxied (funneled) through the same domain so pihole can't detect them.
Just as a warning: after you have it all set up and running, you'll transition into the next phase of Pi-hole ownership which consists of constant blacklist/whitelist editing. A number of popular...
Just as a warning: after you have it all set up and running, you'll transition into the next phase of Pi-hole ownership which consists of constant blacklist/whitelist editing.
A number of popular commerce sites (Macys, Dillards, Joanns, CVS, etc) have a nasty habit of using core libraries and tools that are also commonly used to deliver ads and malware and find themselves on adblock lists. So even with modest ad-lists you'll find a number of sites that end up broken upon loading or act weird during checkout/login. From there it's a matter of looking at the Pi-hole request list while you refresh the page a few times, finding out what was blocked among the tens-to-hundreds of hits each of these bloated sites make and amend the whitelist to suit.
I ended up finding a little golang web-service so family members can just hit a button on a webpage to turn the Pi-hole off for an amount of time but it was still frustrating after a few years since site backends constantly change.
For what it's worth, I'm a networking dummy and I found pihole to be pretty easy setup. There are some functions that just flat break, but most of them are the stupid stuff you didn't really need...
For what it's worth, I'm a networking dummy and I found pihole to be pretty easy setup.
There are some functions that just flat break, but most of them are the stupid stuff you didn't really need anyway.
I don't think it's right to say that the 'smartest people' in America are all working at the big tech firms. I don't want to exhaustively list them, but one of the better examples are the 17...
I don't think it's right to say that the 'smartest people' in America are all working at the big tech firms. I don't want to exhaustively list them, but one of the better examples are the 17 national labs funded by the DOE that employs all manner of scientists and engineers working on climate, energy, pure math, supercomputing, etc. The world's largest super computer is housed at Oak Ridge National Lab, and a even stronger one is currently being built at Argonne National Lab, to be done soon!
And I don't necessarily think it's right to say that the 'smartest people' among even those in the big tech firms are all working on advertising, SEO, and investment banking. Certainly there are a lot of talented people in that space, but there are world-class teams working on building stuff more directly beneficial for humanity. Anything from Intel and NVIDIA, putting out the cutting edge (Intel facing stiff competition from AMD lately, admittedly), to even Facebook. Yes, I am going to try and say something positive about even Facebook here. Facebook, despite their public facing reputation, has put out many ubiquitous open source tools and regularly contribute back to the ones they use; I'm a scientist by trade and PyTorch is an incredible effort that they put out and maintain that I use everyday!
I'm not trying to say that everything that I even listed is perfect, and only good for humanity. I think your example of the Manhattan project is pretty apt of today: There's a lot of good happening, there's a lot of bad happening. Sometimes borne out of the same building minutes apart. The pendulum is swinging stronger the wrong way today, but it does, regularly, swing back.
Recently I was thinking about the ads that appear in magazines. They almost never bother me because they can be easily ignored. They aren't flashing, they aren't moving, and you can choose the...
Recently I was thinking about the ads that appear in magazines. They almost never bother me because they can be easily ignored. They aren't flashing, they aren't moving, and you can choose the amount of time that you pay attention to them.
I hated television ads when I was a kid because they interrupted a program and you could not stop them unless you changed the channel or turned off the tv. Videotape was better because, if there were ads, you could fast forward. Rented DVDs were worse than tapes if they unskippable ads on startup, especially for kid's shows that would be watched more than once.
When the web became popular, there were a few ads for a while and they were a little like magazine ads. But they quickly became animated, blinking, would persist on the page when you scrolled, would have sound, etc. It's like an unwelcome guest who kept moving more of his junk into your house.
Youtube ads are the worst, because, unlike broadcast TV, we know that they should be skippable but there is software in place that prevents it. And a lot of videos are shared, so they are very short so sometimes the length of the ads exceeds the length of the video.
Probably nobody would block ads if they just behaved like print ads and not like an intruder.
I definitely wouldn't. Hell, some newspaper ads can actually be useful. Like finding a new bike repair shop or something. On internet I am conditioned to ignore it because 99% of the time it's a...
Probably nobody would block ads if they just behaved like print ads and not like an intruder.
I definitely wouldn't. Hell, some newspaper ads can actually be useful. Like finding a new bike repair shop or something. On internet I am conditioned to ignore it because 99% of the time it's a scam anyway.
The goal of these ads is to influence you, not be ignored by you. The technology just limits how much they can convince you to look at them. That being said, I personally find myself looking at...
Recently I was thinking about the ads that appear in magazines.
Videotape was better because, if there were ads, you could fast forward.
The goal of these ads is to influence you, not be ignored by you. The technology just limits how much they can convince you to look at them.
That being said, I personally find myself looking at ads if they are not obnoxious and are relevant to my interests in that moment. For example, when I used to go to the movie theater, I'd always try to get there before the movie trailers started because they were pleasant to watch and because I was actively interested in seeing what movies were coming out next. Similar examples include ads for restaurants and tourist attractions while I'm taking a road trip, and classified ads in local newspapers or my local community's Facebook group. However, these are effective because I want to see these ads; I actively seek them out and I'm very receptive to what they have to say.
I feel like a lot of advertisers have forgotten that advertising is a two step process. They focus on the first step (getting noticed) and neglect the second (influencing your purchasing decisions). It seems to me that a whole lot of money is wasted on advertising to the wrong person or in the wrong context just to get clicks (many/most of which are accidental or not even done by humans). And, of course, when these poorly designed ads become widespread enough, people install adblockers and don't see any ads, not even the ones they would like to see.
If I were in the advertising business, I would focus less on trying to defeat adblockers in this unwinnable cat-and-mouse game, and instead focus on developing industry regulations to try to stop bad advertisers from ruining it for good advertisers.
Once you learn that marketing and advertisements are essentially thought manipulation, you start to realize how insidious and vile ads are. And I'm not talking about some kind of conspiracy-theory...
Once you learn that marketing and advertisements are essentially thought manipulation, you start to realize how insidious and vile ads are.
And I'm not talking about some kind of conspiracy-theory subliminal nonsense. I'm talking about what a marketing strategy actually is.
Just throwing some brands out there:
McDonald's
Burger King
Wal Mart
Target
Budweiser
And so on. Assuming you're in the US at least, these are all names you are familiar with, if not instantly recognize and can explain what they are without thinking about them.
Yet, they have huge marketing budgets. Why? Nobody's going to forget about McDonald's or Wal Mart. They're practically synonymous with fast food and shopping.
But that's the goal. They want to be the Kleenex of those things in your brain. And there's only one way to do that - marketing. Constantly telling you, "Hey, remember McDonald's? Well you do now, because we just shoved 30 seconds minimum of it in your face while you're watching your entertainment." The next time you're hungry and you can't just access your fridge, your brain thinks about McNuggets. Or a Big Mac. Or whatever your favorite McDonald's menu item is. Because McDonald's is spending lots of money to make sure you think about them first. That's why a brand you are basically guaranteed to remember when you're in your 80's and your brain is falling apart from dementia spends so much on marketing. It is literally thought control.
Due to my degree having associated with the business school, I had to take a Marketing course in order to fulfill its requirements. I absolutely hated it because of the reasons you mentioned!...
Due to my degree having associated with the business school, I had to take a Marketing course in order to fulfill its requirements. I absolutely hated it because of the reasons you mentioned! There's this weird entwining of psychology within its principles and Maslow's hierarchy was part if the course content; including relating marketing concepts to it. So much of that class came with the energy of "We're just trying to help you decide easier! Aren't we great for taking that mental load of you!"
There are marketing heatmaps for every region of the country, sometimes down to neighborhoods, that are aggregated collections of buying habits to help better target marketing campaigns. Marketing research labs in universities across the country are using eye tracking technology and sending participants through mocked up grocery stores to determine how better to get people to buy their products. One of the extra credit opportunities for the class I was in was a research survey that asked some very specific questions on how you would feel if you saw targeted adds after having a conversation about an item.
That one intro to marketing course made me so disillusioned with ads and being advertised too that it added some extra venom in my perceptions of it. It's all disingenuous, manipulative, and abusing psychological knowledge in the effort to drive sales.
In the words of the late Bill Hicks:
There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers.
He goes a little farther than that, but I'll leave y'all to find the video of the full bit.
As the person who wrote the original comment, yes, that's what I was going for. When I was growing up, everyone just called tissues Kleenexes. It wasn't until I was probably in middle school or...
As the person who wrote the original comment, yes, that's what I was going for. When I was growing up, everyone just called tissues Kleenexes. It wasn't until I was probably in middle school or high school (secondary school) that I learned Kleenex was actually a brand and not just what those were called.
Everyone calls a thin piece of gauze with adhesive tabs on either side that is used to cover minor skin injuries band-aids here, too, even though that is very much a brand.
Everything you said there, you could have said here. So, I'm curious whether your choice to post a link instead of the content essentially an advertisement for your blog? This is not a criticism,...
Everything you said there, you could have said here. So, I'm curious whether your choice to post a link instead of the content essentially an advertisement for your blog? This is not a criticism, but a question.
I'm a full-time ad-blocker too. For the 95% of unwanted stuff that gets blocked there may be 5% of useful stuff that I unfortunately miss out on. It does show up in my life in that my friends know about things before I do, but on the other hand I think I prefer my life without ads to the alternative.
When I am subjected to ads, I notice not only how intrusive they are but also how repetitive and brainwashing they are. My lack of exposure to them means that they're not just "noise" that I can whitenoise out into the background as, perhaps, my friends do. Indeed I hear or read every word and assess them. Not getting the ads protects me but also weakens me for when I do not have control over whatever TV is playing in the doctor's waiting room or when I'm using the guest computer in the hotel lobby.
And in some ways linking a personal blog is better for resharing. Linking your own blog is great, so long as self-promotion isn't the sole interaction you make on the site.
And in some ways linking a personal blog is better for resharing. Linking your own blog is great, so long as self-promotion isn't the sole interaction you make on the site.
Thanks, I just.. I legitimately am lazy and do not see the reason to share same text copy-pasted over and if I fix a typo I would have to fix it everywhere.. I try to follow the idea behind this:...
Thanks, I just.. I legitimately am lazy and do not see the reason to share same text copy-pasted over and if I fix a typo I would have to fix it everywhere..
I do have goatcounter on my site also so seeing that funny reader number go up makes me giddy, but that's really it (and if you use ublock i think you can block the script). I don't sell anything on my site.
But main reason just is that i'm lazy and fixing stuff in one place if needed is easier than going around the interwebs fixing it everywhere.
I also believe more people should share their blogs! I love reading other peoples blogs and my RSS reader is looking for more blogs always.
Your opinion is likely more prevalent than anyone thinks. The problem is we are kinda locked in to dealing with this advertising everywhere. Sure you can adblock a website but you can't do that to...
Your opinion is likely more prevalent than anyone thinks. The problem is we are kinda locked in to dealing with this advertising everywhere. Sure you can adblock a website but you can't do that to television or radio or billboards, etc.
The ad I hated the most was on an MLB stream. It was for Hankook Tires and they were bragging about how quiet their tires are by having the loudest commercial ever. Spokesman speaking in the tone of voice that is basically movie whispers that are louder than normal speaking voice, lots of tech noises, and the sound of a tire rolling over asphalt 3 cm from your eardrum.
Sorry, but if I'm watching baseball at 10pm I'm falling asleep and those commercials were deafening. Ensured that never in my life I will buy Hankook anything. Because their marketing team is a bunch of assholes.
If I go to a store and they have the radio on I can't help that can I? If I go watch the stanley cup at a bar with my friends I still see the ads, do I not? Should I only sit in my room and only...
If I go to a store and they have the radio on I can't help that can I? If I go watch the stanley cup at a bar with my friends I still see the ads, do I not?
Should I only sit in my room and only view things through an adblocker? Should I not sleep on my couch while my roommate watches his baseball game on a service he paid for?
"Just don't watch it" isn't really that much of a solution.
So I'm not the only one!!! I've always gotten incredibly irritated by ads my entire life, even when I didn't use the internet so much as a kid. Even the ads on tv would get on my nerves, all the...
So I'm not the only one!!! I've always gotten incredibly irritated by ads my entire life, even when I didn't use the internet so much as a kid. Even the ads on tv would get on my nerves, all the flashing colors, annoying voices, and tinny music pissed me off an irrational amount. Everyone around always told me I was overreacting and I could never figure out how everyone else could be so calm about ads. I guess I know now though lol. Thanks for sharing this! I feel a little less crazy now.
I went to this one shitty tech bro house party when I was a freshman in college that wanted free beer and I learned how ad tech works and its so fucking cool actually! They do these real-time...
I went to this one shitty tech bro house party when I was a freshman in college that wanted free beer and I learned how ad tech works and its so fucking cool actually! They do these real-time auctions inside like 200 milliseconds. The tech that goes into it is genuinely nifty.
But then I really thought about it and the fact that the greatest computer minds of my generation are being wasted on how to sell bullshit to people was so disheartening that I decided I was done with ads, at least as much as was feasibly doable.
It's also "allegedly" a cooked bidding process. From wiki article on Jedi Blue
It's also "allegedly" a cooked bidding process. From wiki article on Jedi Blue
Facebook allegedly would receive a guarantee of 90% of auctions regardless of the bids; 300 ms to bid (vs 160 offered to others), along with the ability to identify 80% of smartphone users and 60% of web users
My generation was inundated with crazy/extreme advertising from an early age...to the point many of us are damn near immune to most forms id marketing. On top of that I can't stand ads. "NOBODY...
My generation was inundated with crazy/extreme advertising from an early age...to the point many of us are damn near immune to most forms id marketing.
On top of that I can't stand ads. "NOBODY FUCKING CARES ABOUT YOUR STUPID AD!"
I wonder if you’ve ever heard of being a highly sensitive person (often shortened to HSP)? It’s not a widely recognised thing but a theory from a psychologist, Elaine Aaron, who noticed that some...
I wonder if you’ve ever heard of being a highly sensitive person (often shortened to HSP)? It’s not a widely recognised thing but a theory from a psychologist, Elaine Aaron, who noticed that some people seem to have a more sensitive nervous system than others. Physical sensations seem to affect them more. It isn’t necessarily related to neurodivergence although it’s more common as a symptom, I think, than for neurotypical people.
Some examples from myself: I get cranky when my jeans are too tight; too many noises at once, like the tv being on and my husband playing guitar, makes me want to rip my skin off; bright lights are very overwhelming; crowds make me a bit anxious. I feel the same way as you about ads, although they don’t make me angry but more so overwhelmed and almost claustrophobic like I need to escape it.
If this resonates I’m sorry to say there isn’t actually anything you can do about it, but reading about it a bit helped me recognise situations where I’d be overwhelmed and mitigate them
It might be worth reading and thinking about. It helps me avoid situations that make me uncomfortable as I was better able to identify the types of things that stress me
It might be worth reading and thinking about. It helps me avoid situations that make me uncomfortable as I was better able to identify the types of things that stress me
I don’t owe companies my own personal time so they can make money on ads. If I want something, then I’ll seek it out and buy it. If it’s something I don’t know I may want, I’ll live without it. I...
I don’t owe companies my own personal time so they can make money on ads.
If I want something, then I’ll seek it out and buy it. If it’s something I don’t know I may want, I’ll live without it.
I use ad blocks, and feel absolutely no guilt over businesses not getting my money from clicks or actual purchase. It’s their own fault for making the ads as annoying as humanly possible.
With the references you put there it just makes me realize. This is only a problem from commercial disposable stuff. Locktite and mechanical stuff just flys off the shelf for people who use it for...
With the references you put there it just makes me realize. This is only a problem from commercial disposable stuff.
Locktite and mechanical stuff just flys off the shelf for people who use it for work. Since I fix fridges I buy super expensive tools and parts called lokring, and I’ve never once seen an ad for them. Since it’s necessary for the job, they don’t even need to advertise.
I agree. I've written about advertisements before in my personal blog, and I never thought about the optics of someone who suffers from sensitivity to noise and movement.
I myself block ads because they make pages unbearably difficult to read, with all the moving imagery on top of the actual text, massive ads popping in while you're reading, ads in the middle of text, and so on. I don't have a problem with static, tasteful ads, but these are harder and harder to come by.
Which brings me to my second point: ads should be dumb, they should be static. They should be based on the content you're viewing, so say, if I'm reading an article about how to change a cam belt on an old Lancer Evo, I expect ads for mechanics, new cars, so on. But no, ads take an invasive, borderline scary approach to try and "predict" what you like, and this has horrid effects.
I have family members who are not always on top mood, and getting ads that try and amplify that feeling of "you're not good enough" to try and sell them a solution is frankly abhorrent. Besides, one of my coworkers has a story about a friend that was pregnant, her parents didn't know it yet, but because of traffic on the family computer, they started seeing ads that gave it all away. This is, all things considered, not even the worst case. There are people who are prone to gambling, political extremism, etc.
And this takes me to yet another massive issue: ads are manipulative. They try and make you feel inadequate, they use every psychological trick to convince you to buy something you don't need or change your mind. So when you get that combination of being constantly watched, with the knowledge that someone is trying to find a gap in your head to trick you at every conceivable moment, it feels rather unnerving, it has a toll on you if you think too long about it.
What happens if you subconsciously tune out of thinking about it too long? Then you start skimming through content, you start blocking out what is perceived as "noise", it gets harder to immerse yourself in content or take something particularly seriously. If I'm reading an article about a delicate recent event, I don't want my reading of the article to be disturbed by videos of people having a party.
Ads nowadays don't seem to try to sell a product, they try to sell you a lifestyle, a mentality. It's no longer about cars, a cruise, or a mortgage, it's about a message that at the end of the day, compels you to consume more. Something among the lines of "you've failed at life, but you can make it up by buying fancy tat", "you're going to die eventually, why haven't you treated yourself?"
I am fully aware that I might be a downer with regards to ads, but I simply cannot stand modern ads anymore. They're an attack on my senses, and I'm glad this article exists to shine some lights on issues that I failed to perceive beforehand.
(Sorry for snooping around your blog, but congratulations on the marriage!)
I'm not sure that it was ever not about that. The style and form have certainly changed, but I think it's always been about selling that lifestyle angle. If advertising was "honest", it would just be "hey, this thing exists, just FYI, in case you need it later". Instead advertising has always been about telling why you need this product. How your life is flawed, less than optimal, and inadequate without this product. Look at all these other people who have this product living their best life! Don't you want to be like them?
The messaging style changes with the zietgeist, but the basic mechanics being employed are older than men with wooden wagons selling literal snake oil.
This is what I try to do. I'm always honest when I'm promoting something I did, to excruciating detail. It's a bit different on social media, but yeah.
I've never liked the manipulative, psychological angle of marketing. That's really what it comes down to. It's a knee-deep science to tap into someone's weaknesses, to sell something that is perceived as "important" but truly isn't. As a result, everything is noise.
Yeah. Ad blockers make the overall experience better. Full screen ads on mobile that take directly you to play store. Video ads that start on high volume and full HD resolution. Ads on news website disguised as real news. Websites that ask for notification access and then show ads in notifications. No more.
Heh, thank you :)
It is kind of sad how much in the world economy is revolved around ads. Especially in tech. We have thousands of brilliant engineers working for companies like Facebook or Google, but at the end of the day all their skills and knowledge are ultimately used with the goal of optimizing ads. Sure it produces some other useful tech in its wake, but their ultimate goal is not to make a good product for consumers but for advertisers.
I don't mind paying for services to get them ad free but it is still impossible to avoid in some cases. I pay obscene amounts of money for a sports streaming service. I know sports rights are expensive so I can suck that up, but I still get shown countless ads for gambling sites that are clearly aimed at addicts or creating new ones.
Watching premier league always felt so weird with how over the top gambling advertising is there, but now it's the same in the US and more aggressive in some ways. I like placing a small bet now and then, it's just so quickly permeated American sports, down to the commentary teams reading promos for draftkings, fan duel, etc. We went from 0 to 100 really quick - MLB/NHL and NBA had (have?) equity stakes in draftkings and fan duel respectively.
I just did a major overhaul to "de-ad" my home network as much as possible: piHole on the network, SmartTube on the TV, Ublock + Privacy Badger + SponsorBlock + DeArrow on my PC and the kids' computers. And I have a VPN with built-in adblocking and all kinds of spoofing too, if needed.
I get it: we can't have stuff for free. Ads pay the bills. Creators need to eat. Alphabet execs need their luxury vacations. My problem is not with ads as a concept, but with the horrible intrusive, cringy mess that online ads and clickbait have become.
I'm about to implement piHole on my home network and have the hardware on my list but holy smokes this might be a little out of my realm of expertise. Even with youtube this is pretty intimidating. Most tutorials I've seen assume the viewer already has a basic working knowledge of pi/home networking so they jump straight into it and I'm like "oh god either he skipped about 24 steps or I am completely lost here". Don't get me wrong, I'm fine following most tutorials but with this stuff I feel like an idiot. "Ladies and Gentleman of the jury, I'm just a Caveman. I fell in some ice and later got thawed out by your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me!"
If anyone has any resources for this (specifically piHole for blocking ads on a home network) "for dummies" I'd be forever grateful.
I really appreciate it, thanks!
You mentioned that you are using youtube to watch videos about pihole.
By the way, pihole does not block any ads within youtube. It only blocks ads that come from a different domain than the initial request. All of youtube's ads are proxied (funneled) through the same domain so pihole can't detect them.
You may also want to take a look at NextDNS, too! Takes the self-hosting headache out of the equation.
Just as a warning: after you have it all set up and running, you'll transition into the next phase of Pi-hole ownership which consists of constant blacklist/whitelist editing.
A number of popular commerce sites (Macys, Dillards, Joanns, CVS, etc) have a nasty habit of using core libraries and tools that are also commonly used to deliver ads and malware and find themselves on adblock lists. So even with modest ad-lists you'll find a number of sites that end up broken upon loading or act weird during checkout/login. From there it's a matter of looking at the Pi-hole request list while you refresh the page a few times, finding out what was blocked among the tens-to-hundreds of hits each of these bloated sites make and amend the whitelist to suit.
I ended up finding a little golang web-service so family members can just hit a button on a webpage to turn the Pi-hole off for an amount of time but it was still frustrating after a few years since site backends constantly change.
For what it's worth, I'm a networking dummy and I found pihole to be pretty easy setup.
There are some functions that just flat break, but most of them are the stupid stuff you didn't really need anyway.
I don't think it's right to say that the 'smartest people' in America are all working at the big tech firms. I don't want to exhaustively list them, but one of the better examples are the 17 national labs funded by the DOE that employs all manner of scientists and engineers working on climate, energy, pure math, supercomputing, etc. The world's largest super computer is housed at Oak Ridge National Lab, and a even stronger one is currently being built at Argonne National Lab, to be done soon!
And I don't necessarily think it's right to say that the 'smartest people' among even those in the big tech firms are all working on advertising, SEO, and investment banking. Certainly there are a lot of talented people in that space, but there are world-class teams working on building stuff more directly beneficial for humanity. Anything from Intel and NVIDIA, putting out the cutting edge (Intel facing stiff competition from AMD lately, admittedly), to even Facebook. Yes, I am going to try and say something positive about even Facebook here. Facebook, despite their public facing reputation, has put out many ubiquitous open source tools and regularly contribute back to the ones they use; I'm a scientist by trade and PyTorch is an incredible effort that they put out and maintain that I use everyday!
I'm not trying to say that everything that I even listed is perfect, and only good for humanity. I think your example of the Manhattan project is pretty apt of today: There's a lot of good happening, there's a lot of bad happening. Sometimes borne out of the same building minutes apart. The pendulum is swinging stronger the wrong way today, but it does, regularly, swing back.
Recently I was thinking about the ads that appear in magazines. They almost never bother me because they can be easily ignored. They aren't flashing, they aren't moving, and you can choose the amount of time that you pay attention to them.
I hated television ads when I was a kid because they interrupted a program and you could not stop them unless you changed the channel or turned off the tv. Videotape was better because, if there were ads, you could fast forward. Rented DVDs were worse than tapes if they unskippable ads on startup, especially for kid's shows that would be watched more than once.
When the web became popular, there were a few ads for a while and they were a little like magazine ads. But they quickly became animated, blinking, would persist on the page when you scrolled, would have sound, etc. It's like an unwelcome guest who kept moving more of his junk into your house.
Youtube ads are the worst, because, unlike broadcast TV, we know that they should be skippable but there is software in place that prevents it. And a lot of videos are shared, so they are very short so sometimes the length of the ads exceeds the length of the video.
Probably nobody would block ads if they just behaved like print ads and not like an intruder.
I definitely wouldn't. Hell, some newspaper ads can actually be useful. Like finding a new bike repair shop or something. On internet I am conditioned to ignore it because 99% of the time it's a scam anyway.
The goal of these ads is to influence you, not be ignored by you. The technology just limits how much they can convince you to look at them.
That being said, I personally find myself looking at ads if they are not obnoxious and are relevant to my interests in that moment. For example, when I used to go to the movie theater, I'd always try to get there before the movie trailers started because they were pleasant to watch and because I was actively interested in seeing what movies were coming out next. Similar examples include ads for restaurants and tourist attractions while I'm taking a road trip, and classified ads in local newspapers or my local community's Facebook group. However, these are effective because I want to see these ads; I actively seek them out and I'm very receptive to what they have to say.
I feel like a lot of advertisers have forgotten that advertising is a two step process. They focus on the first step (getting noticed) and neglect the second (influencing your purchasing decisions). It seems to me that a whole lot of money is wasted on advertising to the wrong person or in the wrong context just to get clicks (many/most of which are accidental or not even done by humans). And, of course, when these poorly designed ads become widespread enough, people install adblockers and don't see any ads, not even the ones they would like to see.
If I were in the advertising business, I would focus less on trying to defeat adblockers in this unwinnable cat-and-mouse game, and instead focus on developing industry regulations to try to stop bad advertisers from ruining it for good advertisers.
Once you learn that marketing and advertisements are essentially thought manipulation, you start to realize how insidious and vile ads are.
And I'm not talking about some kind of conspiracy-theory subliminal nonsense. I'm talking about what a marketing strategy actually is.
Just throwing some brands out there:
And so on. Assuming you're in the US at least, these are all names you are familiar with, if not instantly recognize and can explain what they are without thinking about them.
Yet, they have huge marketing budgets. Why? Nobody's going to forget about McDonald's or Wal Mart. They're practically synonymous with fast food and shopping.
But that's the goal. They want to be the Kleenex of those things in your brain. And there's only one way to do that - marketing. Constantly telling you, "Hey, remember McDonald's? Well you do now, because we just shoved 30 seconds minimum of it in your face while you're watching your entertainment." The next time you're hungry and you can't just access your fridge, your brain thinks about McNuggets. Or a Big Mac. Or whatever your favorite McDonald's menu item is. Because McDonald's is spending lots of money to make sure you think about them first. That's why a brand you are basically guaranteed to remember when you're in your 80's and your brain is falling apart from dementia spends so much on marketing. It is literally thought control.
That's a huge reason I block ads.
Due to my degree having associated with the business school, I had to take a Marketing course in order to fulfill its requirements. I absolutely hated it because of the reasons you mentioned! There's this weird entwining of psychology within its principles and Maslow's hierarchy was part if the course content; including relating marketing concepts to it. So much of that class came with the energy of "We're just trying to help you decide easier! Aren't we great for taking that mental load of you!"
There are marketing heatmaps for every region of the country, sometimes down to neighborhoods, that are aggregated collections of buying habits to help better target marketing campaigns. Marketing research labs in universities across the country are using eye tracking technology and sending participants through mocked up grocery stores to determine how better to get people to buy their products. One of the extra credit opportunities for the class I was in was a research survey that asked some very specific questions on how you would feel if you saw targeted adds after having a conversation about an item.
That one intro to marketing course made me so disillusioned with ads and being advertised too that it added some extra venom in my perceptions of it. It's all disingenuous, manipulative, and abusing psychological knowledge in the effort to drive sales.
In the words of the late Bill Hicks:
He goes a little farther than that, but I'll leave y'all to find the video of the full bit.
What do you mean by this? Isn't Kleenex a tissue brand? And a pretty un-memorable one at that.
In the US at least, it's synonomous with 'tissue' the way 'Google' is search engine.
Bandaid is another good example.
Really? That sounds odd to me. In the UK, maybe other countries too, we would call a little sticky bandage like that a plaster.
As the person who wrote the original comment, yes, that's what I was going for. When I was growing up, everyone just called tissues Kleenexes. It wasn't until I was probably in middle school or high school (secondary school) that I learned Kleenex was actually a brand and not just what those were called.
Everyone calls a thin piece of gauze with adhesive tabs on either side that is used to cover minor skin injuries band-aids here, too, even though that is very much a brand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
Yet another blogpost from yours truly. Just wondering if I'm alone with this problem.
TL;DR: Ads are not accessible.
Everything you said there, you could have said here. So, I'm curious whether your choice to post a link instead of the content essentially an advertisement for your blog? This is not a criticism, but a question.
I'm a full-time ad-blocker too. For the 95% of unwanted stuff that gets blocked there may be 5% of useful stuff that I unfortunately miss out on. It does show up in my life in that my friends know about things before I do, but on the other hand I think I prefer my life without ads to the alternative.
When I am subjected to ads, I notice not only how intrusive they are but also how repetitive and brainwashing they are. My lack of exposure to them means that they're not just "noise" that I can whitenoise out into the background as, perhaps, my friends do. Indeed I hear or read every word and assess them. Not getting the ads protects me but also weakens me for when I do not have control over whatever TV is playing in the doctor's waiting room or when I'm using the guest computer in the hotel lobby.
Im lazy.
And in some ways linking a personal blog is better for resharing. Linking your own blog is great, so long as self-promotion isn't the sole interaction you make on the site.
Thanks, I just.. I legitimately am lazy and do not see the reason to share same text copy-pasted over and if I fix a typo I would have to fix it everywhere..
I try to follow the idea behind this: https://indieweb.org/POSSE
I do have goatcounter on my site also so seeing that funny reader number go up makes me giddy, but that's really it (and if you use ublock i think you can block the script). I don't sell anything on my site.
But main reason just is that i'm lazy and fixing stuff in one place if needed is easier than going around the interwebs fixing it everywhere.
I also believe more people should share their blogs! I love reading other peoples blogs and my RSS reader is looking for more blogs always.
Your opinion is likely more prevalent than anyone thinks. The problem is we are kinda locked in to dealing with this advertising everywhere. Sure you can adblock a website but you can't do that to television or radio or billboards, etc.
The ad I hated the most was on an MLB stream. It was for Hankook Tires and they were bragging about how quiet their tires are by having the loudest commercial ever. Spokesman speaking in the tone of voice that is basically movie whispers that are louder than normal speaking voice, lots of tech noises, and the sound of a tire rolling over asphalt 3 cm from your eardrum.
Sorry, but if I'm watching baseball at 10pm I'm falling asleep and those commercials were deafening. Ensured that never in my life I will buy Hankook anything. Because their marketing team is a bunch of assholes.
If I go to a store and they have the radio on I can't help that can I? If I go watch the stanley cup at a bar with my friends I still see the ads, do I not?
Should I only sit in my room and only view things through an adblocker? Should I not sleep on my couch while my roommate watches his baseball game on a service he paid for?
"Just don't watch it" isn't really that much of a solution.
Oh I know that part. I just wanted to bring accessibility stuff more in the light.
So I'm not the only one!!! I've always gotten incredibly irritated by ads my entire life, even when I didn't use the internet so much as a kid. Even the ads on tv would get on my nerves, all the flashing colors, annoying voices, and tinny music pissed me off an irrational amount. Everyone around always told me I was overreacting and I could never figure out how everyone else could be so calm about ads. I guess I know now though lol. Thanks for sharing this! I feel a little less crazy now.
Glad to be help, and glad to hear I'm not alone :)
I went to this one shitty tech bro house party when I was a freshman in college that wanted free beer and I learned how ad tech works and its so fucking cool actually! They do these real-time auctions inside like 200 milliseconds. The tech that goes into it is genuinely nifty.
But then I really thought about it and the fact that the greatest computer minds of my generation are being wasted on how to sell bullshit to people was so disheartening that I decided I was done with ads, at least as much as was feasibly doable.
It's also "allegedly" a cooked bidding process. From wiki article on Jedi Blue
My generation was inundated with crazy/extreme advertising from an early age...to the point many of us are damn near immune to most forms id marketing.
On top of that I can't stand ads. "NOBODY FUCKING CARES ABOUT YOUR STUPID AD!"
I wonder if you’ve ever heard of being a highly sensitive person (often shortened to HSP)? It’s not a widely recognised thing but a theory from a psychologist, Elaine Aaron, who noticed that some people seem to have a more sensitive nervous system than others. Physical sensations seem to affect them more. It isn’t necessarily related to neurodivergence although it’s more common as a symptom, I think, than for neurotypical people.
Some examples from myself: I get cranky when my jeans are too tight; too many noises at once, like the tv being on and my husband playing guitar, makes me want to rip my skin off; bright lights are very overwhelming; crowds make me a bit anxious. I feel the same way as you about ads, although they don’t make me angry but more so overwhelmed and almost claustrophobic like I need to escape it.
If this resonates I’m sorry to say there isn’t actually anything you can do about it, but reading about it a bit helped me recognise situations where I’d be overwhelmed and mitigate them
Does sound familiar, but can't say for sure. Most of the things I've learned to live with, but recently I've started to notice the problems more.
It might be worth reading and thinking about. It helps me avoid situations that make me uncomfortable as I was better able to identify the types of things that stress me
I don’t owe companies my own personal time so they can make money on ads.
If I want something, then I’ll seek it out and buy it. If it’s something I don’t know I may want, I’ll live without it.
I use ad blocks, and feel absolutely no guilt over businesses not getting my money from clicks or actual purchase. It’s their own fault for making the ads as annoying as humanly possible.
With the references you put there it just makes me realize. This is only a problem from commercial disposable stuff.
Locktite and mechanical stuff just flys off the shelf for people who use it for work. Since I fix fridges I buy super expensive tools and parts called lokring, and I’ve never once seen an ad for them. Since it’s necessary for the job, they don’t even need to advertise.