Comment by makingstuffs
21 days ago
I don’t know if it is just a symptom of growing up during the days of the net’s Wild West and navigating through sites like gamecopyworld or what, but I just seem to have some inbuilt filter which doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of ads.
It’s hard to explain but it is like some subconscious filtering that occurs on a preRecognise hook or something. Weird.
I do not have that filter, but I have been using ad blockers for so long that my tolerance for ads is near zero. Being interrupted by an ad is enough for me to close the tab or turn the device off.
I can't imagine what it's like to access modern websites unfiltered.
Visiting friends/family sometimes I have to ask for the TV to be turned off so we can talk and visit. Not to make some sort of statement or signal my dislike for the content, but to stop having my attention grabbed over and over for useless dribble/ads. They do not understand how horribly distracting it is to someone who isn't numbed to its omnipresence.
I haven't had broadcast tv for decades. I already had to ask my friend to mute commercials to help me follow conversation after a couple of years (he just tuned them out). I concluded that I would hate the company I worked for because of their intrusive ads while visiting family during the holidays a year after that. My partner still objects to how angry I get when an ad is shoved into our on-demand content, but that meant that I figured out how to stop Plex from serving us ads after it happened ONE TIME (fuck you, Plex, I used to like you).
I can't believe how normalized this stuff is. It's loud. It's incredibly stupid. It treats the viewer as unintelligent. It's really offensive if you aren't used to it.
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It’s horrible on mobile. Sites like macobserver are bad. Two videos overlapping, popping in and out, shifting content.
There are really good ad blockers on mobile these days. I use AdGuard for Safari and it's as good as uBlock on desktop Firefox.
I left my iPad deliberately unfiltered to discourage browsing - it's a bedroom device - and it's ridiculously effective. I see a cookie banner with the "legitimate interest" nonsense and I give up.
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I also use adblock and what ends up happening as a consequence is the ads I do see are the shittiest of shitty ads that don't even come from a recognized network. :)
If you see any ads at all, then your adblocker isn't aggressive enough. I don't think I have seen a single ad since I installed uBlock Origin, but I also installed s bunch of extra filters first thing I did.
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Possibly an instance of banner blindness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness
This is interesting. I intrinsically knew this was a thing without knowing it was formalized.
Sorta the same as the emails that went out to employees of my org telling them that we would perform network upgrades that resulted in IP addresses changing. Not one person that I've assisted updating their devices read those emails because they were mentally filtered out as noise. We sent a lot of notices, fwiw.
Thank you! I’ve been searching for a term to describe this type of “ad blindness”.
I’ve also trained myself to recognize and not consume ads anywhere they are not blocked.
Who doesn't think this about themselves. It's like when people say they're immune to propaganda. Isn't this thinking what makes people think their smart devices are listening to conversations rather than targeted ads you only notice after it's had the effect on you.
I don't think I am immune to propaganda, and definitely not ads. I can't stand ads at all. They immediately grab my attention, even if I make a conscious attempt at ignoring them. It truly feels terrible.
Even for propaganda, I am constantly made aware of my propaganda immunity being subpar for all different kinds of propaganda. Often it's just subtle seeds of propaganda that impact the choice of words that I use to be something different than what I really believe in, and sometimes it is more serious and deeper cases of propagandisation. Very unfortunate, but each time it shows me why I should be critical of everything that I read online.
"marketing works on you, even if you know how marketing works on you"
Whether you're filtering it, or it's subconsciously working is a bit hard to say. Plenty of people think they're 'immune' to advertising - but the goal is often very simple. Just putting the name of a brand in your head can pay off months or years later when going to buy something. That associating of X brand with Y product is already there, even if you've long forgotten the source.
Point taken for existing established brands. Surely this can't be said about "brands" that got spun up in last few weeks and will be gone soon.
Gamecopyworld… now there’s a name I have not heard in a long time.
I feel the same though. My only complaint when Adblockers fail is that I have to scroll so much to read some articles on some sites. Sure, there may be some level of subconscious registration occurring in my brain for maybe the company logo, but it’s usually minimal.
There was a site that kept breaking my Reader-mode last week. I would turn it on to filter ads, it would disable it by updating an element (I think that's how it got disabled).
I curled the page and piped it to a markdown conversion tool because I really wanted whatever information I'd searched. It's the first time I ever didn't just close the tab and move on because whatever I'd searched was a pressing issue that I wanted to solve.
What a fucking dick move by that site. Fuck them, whoever they were.
just made me flashback to a url bar and typing that too long of a url
For me, it depends on how well-disguised the ad is. Ads quietly sitting there, informing? Those I blank out. The big flashy animations? Those make me switch to reader mode, or leave the domain entirely.
I do sometimes find I'm accidentally clicking on the ads at the top of search engine results, though for this case it's extra ironic as the ad is for the real thing I'm searching for which is 2 results further down the list, and I only realise I clicked on an ad when the link goes via an ad-tracking domain that I block.
I've recently been fooled by an ad in reddit that was pretending to be news, which took me to a fake BBC website. First hint, I also block the BBC domain (nothing wrong with them, it's just a habit I want to get out of given I don't live in the UK any more).
Same here. What's worse is that some pages "highlight" content in a similar fashion to an ad in the middle and I'm a bit unaware of that content. Only when something doesn't add up I'll scroll back and see the missing content.
Yea I'm with you there. I honestly don't even see ads. Even YouTube ads that start playing, my brain switches off till I can skip. I also don't read the news at all anywhere, so that helps.
I think a lot of people who grew up on the early web have that reflex