Comment by DrewADesign
3 days ago
My favorite most annoying ad tactic is the trick slowing down progress bar. It starts off fast making it seem like it’s going to be, say, a ten-second ad so you decide to suffer through it… but progressively slows so you notice at like the 20 second mark you’re only 2/3 of the way through the progress bar, so probably less than halfway done. Murderous rage.
Mr. Beast on youtube is guilty of that. Matt Parker of Standup Maths fame did an in-depth look at how that works. Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc0OU1yJD-c
If you watch him on Joe Rogan’s podcast he gives a full overview of how every single tiny detail down to colors, length of scene cuts, facial expressions, language, total length of videos, time of day for release, thumbnails, sound effects, music is extensively A/B tested to not only optimize for the algorithm but for hijacking people’s attention as well. That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing aren’t by accident. Everything is intentional because he obsessively tests anything that might give him even the slightest edge in a sea of videos. The content itself barely matters.
This seems like innately hostile behaviour. Not to other video creators, but to his audience. Stripping as much as he can using data and mathematics is the kind of thing engineers do to pull more out of a machine, not something you do when you're creating informal communications to other humans.
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>That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing aren’t by accident.
I take your point, but I am still baffled why people find this appealing.
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It seems we're living a Max Headroom episode.
Guests smoking weed A/B tested too? :)
How do you A/B test on YouTube?
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> Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general.
My first thought is that the person has a strong grasp of their profession and they love money. A hack like that has to have a really high value/effort ratio.
I was forced to do this as a developer of Flash websites in the early 00's.
I loved making custom progress bars really fun so people didn't mind watching the huge sites download.
I HATED when they had me mess with the time so that it got to 90% really fast and then spent AGES finishing the last 10%.
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A fantastic video from Matt, as usual.
Yet another data point on why nobody should be wasting a second watching Mr Beast content. Complete algorithmically optimized garbage.
I recall Mr Beast showing up in a Colin Furze video for a few minutes and Mr Beast was very clearly incapable of being a normal person. He was obviously out of place, being in full makeup and styled, and couldn't seem to be bothered to actually engage or express real interest in the subject. I think the guy has replaced his real persona with some manifestation of the YouTube algorithm. If he's not actively making money, he's just a shell.
Luckily the recommendation system does work to some extent. I'm glad I don't get to see any of that stuff on my youtube. Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking.
It's scary imagining people getting sucked into that :/
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Mr Beast not looking like a normal person next to Colin Furze is impressive.
That guy is so over the top that I cannot bear watching his videos, despite them theoretically being exactly up my alley. I like tinkering videos, I like his ideas, and the high-quality results, but I hate his mannerisms.
Every time see Mr Beast (I don't watch any of his stuff, just accidentally see promos on Prime sometimes), he reminds me of Homer Simpson's forced smile in the Simpsons' espiode "Re-Nedufication" [0].
[0]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/84/8e/c8848e81afa88a42bd4d...
That Colin Furze cameo was so weird.
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They somehow got him doing a cameo on this upcoming Survivor season and it's going to be terrible.
Not the only thing he's guilty of.
explain
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MrBeast is a hack, but its worth pointing out that all "progress bars" are bad design. You could make the same complaint against most of the progress bars in MsDOS. There was never a consistency in timing so you can never really use them to gauge how much time is left.
We’re not talking about a measure of computational progress here. We’re talking about visually representing how much time has elapsed out of a fixed duration. This is exactly where progress indicators shine, the total time for the thing to happen is perfectly specified in advance.
The difference between a lot of OS/app progress bars for IO (and sometimes CPU) operations and these timers, is that the total length of time for a lot of IO operations is often unknown with any accuracy so you have to use a heuristic to guess the current % done.
For instance: when reading/writing/both many files of differing sizes on traditional drives there is an amount of latency per file which is significant and not always predictable. Whether you base progress on total size or number of files or some more complicated calc based on both, it will be inaccurate in most cases, sometimes badly so. Even when copying a single large file on a shared drive, or just on a dedicated system with multiple tasks running, the progress is inherently a bit random, the same for any network transfer. Worse are many database requests: you don't get any progress often because there is no progress output until the query processing is complete, and the last byte of the result might arrive in the same fraction of a second the first does¹. The same for network requests, though IE (at least as early as v3) and early versions of Edge did outright lie² there to try make themselves look faster than the competition.
The progress bars in videos are a different beast (ahem): the total time is absolutely known, any inaccuracy is either a deliberate lie or gross incompetence.
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[1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner).
[2] It would creep up, getting as far as 80%, before the first byte of response is received. This also confused users who thought that something was actually happening when the action was in fact stalled and just going to time-out.
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Many progress bars or other indicators lie, and the incentive is always to make it look good at the beginning, so that’s what we end up seeing most, whether it’s these ad ones (which thankfully I’ve never seen) or installers or especially something like Uber that always lies about how quickly someone is coming to make it appealing and then stretches it out. Even the thing in your car that tells you how much range you have left before refuelling (except it starts showing more than you actually have). I think in all cases it’s probably possible to give a more realistic estimate but it’s counter to the goals of whoever designed it.
As a full mea culpa, I once implemented this years ago for an open-source project (non-ad-related) that could have an unpredictable number of steps with unpredictable timing. We went with an algorithm that would add a % of the remaining progress on each status tick, so, while it would inevitably decelerate, at least users would know that the processing wasn't just frozen.
It was a compromise that let us focus our limited attention on the things our project could uniquely do, without needing to refactor or do fast-and-slow-passes to provide subtask-count estimates to the UI. I'd make those same choices again, in that context. But in an ad context, it's inexcusable.
If the only purpose is to show progress and you don’t known the total number of steps in advance, it’s better to show information about the current step and/or substep. Otherwise when your processing actually freezes, the UI would still happily show an advancing progress bar. That’s worse than even just showing a spinner animation or similar.
If it froze and ceased emitting ticks, it wouldn't advance any more - but the larger point is well taken!
I've done something similar with a progress bar back in the early days. The task needed to do 10 things, so when each one completed the bar would move 10%. So the bar indicated completion in terms of things that needed to be done but not really in terms of time. It was quick and dirty and we had higher priorities but someone insisted on a "progress bar" so that was the easiest thing.
That’s perfectly acceptable, in particular if you also display “step x of 10”, so the user knows the bar doesn’t indicate time.
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.)
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.
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.
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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.
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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
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.
QA is something an employee should do, not me.
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).
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.)
On iOS I have seen ads with very small close buttons, so clearly intended to cause people to miss-click. Buttons should be 44x44 pixels, it’s recommended in the human interface guidelines [0].
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[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
IME it's a real close button but the ad opens the thing when it closes, regardless of how it closes.
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.
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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
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There's also the tactic of having different ad behaviours during the same video. The first will be a 30s unskippable ad, the second will be a single skippable one, the third will be 3 ads, one of which you can skip, etc. It's ok on a mobile or if you're at your desk, but if you're watching from a distance it gets really annoying...
You mean like this:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
The Windows file copying progress bar prepared me for that one. I don't trust progress bars anymore.
The positive version of this is clocks in escape rooms. You set the countdown timer to be slightly faster for the first 45 minutes and slightly slower for the last 10, so that people get more of a taste of time pressure towards the end and a higher chance of a "photo finish" which makes for a great fun story.
Kind of like a genius idea. Though there should be a special place in hell for app owners who want this in their app.
Reminds me of Setup.exe
Uber (and many other apps probably) do a similar thing. A completely deceptive progress bar that's basically an animation that's AB tested for lowest perceived wait, rather than being an actual progress bar in any sense of the word!
Everything is trying to scam you nowadays jfc