Why so many people get triggered about ads nowadays?
Wherever I go, I often see the sentiment “This website has ads, so it’s trash” pop up in conversations. And honestly I don’t quite get why. 90% of the internet has always had ads, you just scroll past them and mind your business. At least they’re personalized now so you can pick a topic you like instead of diapers and miscellanous spammy trash as there once were.
You can’t scroll some of the ads, that’s one of the problems.
There are video ads that remain on the bottom of the page regardless of what you do. Same for image ads.
I’m trying to read an article and there is distracting ads all over the page.
Ads back in 90s were subtle, I have zero problems with textual google ads in the article but videos and images that is also slowing down my experience with its large downloads?
Sites are like loading 10m of content for a 2kb text article. Come on.
Advertising is a huge waste of societal resources.
Think about it: what's the actual point of advertising, from the consumer's point of view? I would argue it's to get notified of available products, and why you might want that product.
But that's not what advertising does 99% of the time, now. Advertising now is a collection of products that you already know exist, have probably already looked at, but now you're getting spammed. Because they aren't trying to educate you as a consumer - they're trying to use exposure to trick you into buying their particular product instead of someone else's identical product.
If you look at the total GDP that goes to advertising, it's frankly insane. It's lost 20%. Add finance into that, and most of our GDP is centered around meta-economics rather than stuff people want/need/will use.
they’re trying to use exposure to trick you into buying their particular product instead of someone else’s identical product.
That’s probably the case for a lot of products, but I don’t agree with your generalization that advertising offers nothing to the consumer and is presumably a drain on the economy.
I run a small business and see noticeable returns on advertising dollars spent vs not advertising. I run a services business and advertising makes it easier for clients to find us and makes me more money that I put back into the economy by buying lavish things like food and rent. I hate advertising and wish I didn’t have to pay Google or use social media to promote our “brand”, but the truth is I do in order to stay competitive.
The advertising I’m buying isn’t tricking or spamming anybody, it’s targeted to people that are looking for that kind of service in my area and it doesn’t misrepresent our work in any way. What it does do is get my foot through the door and increases the likelihood of them reaching out to us over the schmucks down the street that offer a similar service, but are not as good as us in terms of value, customer service and quality of work. There’s value in that for the consumer.
For most people it isn’t the ads, it’s the way ads are implemented. They harvest insane amounts of data to track and identify you. Then the ads in social media are inserted deceptively, or you get popups that deliberately make it difficult to dismiss them, or you’re trying to read an article but there’s an ad between evwry sentence. Most people would be ok with small, non deceptive ads that didn’t require you to sogn away your entire life to target them to you, but most ads these days are not that.
Ads have gotten worse and worse overtime. Some websites are so stuffed with ads the performance of the website suffers. Then there are risks associated with ads when many have become malicious or used to track people. Then what is advertised can also be extremely questionable. Everything from useless products to addictive mobile games to harmful "health" products to crypto scams show up on ads.
I'm fine with some ads on free websites/service if they're not crazy but too many sites have gone nuts. I'm not ok with ads with paid services. Ads during shows/movies are a no go when I paid for them.
Because I can’t go two minutes without someone trying to sell me something, and it’s infuriating. I can’t even browse Lemmy without someone spamming my feed with their shitty Lets Play videos, or some random selfhosted project posted by the company who made it.
It’s disingenuine, and is to me one of the single largest reasons I’ve switched over to decentralized platforms.
There’s this idea, that if the companies just knew enough about you, they could send you the perfect ads. Ads you’d appreciate. Ads for things you didn’t even realise you needed until you saw the Ad. This ignores that there are entire industries, and entire product ranges between industries, that - for one reason or another - never advertise.
All the information in the world about how I might want a new microwave is no good when you realise that you never see and ad for a microwave. Likewise, the ‘perfect ad’ for me most of the time would be something for specialised tools (for plumbing or bike repair or whatever) - again, something you never see an Ad for. So the ads I get are just weird, and I spend longer trying to figure why I getting it than I ever would do entertaining the idea that I’d click on it. In fact, the only adverts I’ve ever clicked on have been by accident, so every one is just a waste of time and space.
I get ads may be a necessary evil if you're using a website or service you aren't directly paying for, but 9/10 times it's because of how they're implemented and behave and advertisers and large publishers are out of touch with users and never learned or they simply just don't care.
First off, it seems that ads always have to be presented in the most obnoxious ways and this is a problem that's almost as old as the internet. I remember going online back in the late 90s and early 2000s, you'd get those extremely obnoxious and seizure inducing "YOU'RE OUR 1'000'000 VISITOR" or "YOU WON A FREE IPOD" ads. Today though, ads are still as annoying or even worse to an extent since every website now insists having autoplaying videos with sound or if you're using a phone and trying to read an article, 3/4 of the page will be taken up by an ad and you have little room to view the actual content.
Secondly, ads have been increasingly becoming a privacy issue. Advertisers want to know every little thing about us and have the ability to track us around the web. I really want advertisers especially to know as little as possible about me because they clearly can't be trusted with data wether they keep it internally or sell it to data brokers because some of the data they're able to collect is alarming.
Even in European countries there are two dominant parties that work with others on their side of the aisle. In fact the concept of a left and right comes from France.
Polarization is universal in politics at the scales or democracy.
Personally, I don’t mind ads that are not extremely obnoxious. A clickable link on the sidebar advertising something or a random picture here and there - no problemo, as they’re easy to ignore.
What I can’t stand are the extremely intrusive ones - pop-ups that obscure half of the screen with such a tiny little X in the corner that you need to click it in a pixel-perfect manner so you won’t “accidentally” open the ad itself. Ads that play music at full volume without warning. Unskippable ads in videos. Sites that greet you with “we noticed you’re using an adblocker” and just won’t let you view the actual site content. Ads that make the rest of the site lag like hell or freeze entirely. Rapidly flashing ads in neon colors that almost make you have a seizure by looking at them. Those can GTFO and if my adblocker isn’t able to / allowed to hide them, I simply won’t use the site in question anymore and that’s it.
To make an IRL comparison: I don’t mind at all if there are advertisement brochures just lying around on a counter while I’m in a mall, because I can decide on my own whether or not I want to take one of those. But if there is an employee blocking my way, screaming at the top of their lungs and slapping me across the face with said brochure, and I am not allowed to knock them out cold, then I’ll never set foot into that store again, ever.
Fun fact. There’s a dating app, can’t remember which one, where it would display a full sized ad, and if you even tried to swipe back, it would instantly load the playstore.
Sorry. Not swiping to go back. Swiping to close the app. I removed that insanely quick. Whilst still not ideal, Tinder has an ad system that shows like a users profile. But you can just swipe it away without any bullshit. Or if you like the look od it you can click or swipe on it. Take a guess which one has a significantly better user experience.
I very clearly remember a time when only a handful of websites actually had ads on them and having an ad blocker wasn’t a straight up requirement to stem the tide of popups and banners.
Youtube, before Google bought it, was pretty nice. A little ad taking up a square in the upper right corner, just above recommended videos, and I think that was about it. Nowadays it’s completely impossible to watch YouTube without ad blockers or premium subscription.
And that is really sad. In the early days, I disabled my ad blocker for Youtube, as I tend to do with the websites I enjoy, but evidently I’ve had to re-enable it since to keep my sanity.
As so many others, I don’t have a problem with passive or “docile” ads, but I do have a vendetta against intrusive anti-user experiences, which has led me to block ads and other kinds of annoyances /intrusions per default.
The whole “need for more aggressive ads as result of adblockers” is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Just be careful because just because ads aren’t intrusive doesn’t mean they don’t track you. If ads were hosted locally on a website and not part of a big ad network then ad-blockers would be pretty ineffective anyway.
For even more blocking there’s a plugin called sponsorblock. It automatically skips marked sponsor segments in videos. The segments are user submitted so not all videos have em but it’s so great!
… and you can’t even remove ads from your own channel. As a content creator I was happy to find a “disable advertisements” option in the settings menu - my channel isn’t monetized anyway, so getting rid of those super intrusive ads sounded like a win/win situation.
Turns out this only disables “interest based” ads so my viewers still get shoved ads down their throats, just that those are entirely random now instead of custom-tailored towards their interests. Thanks, youtube - very helpful and exactly what I wanted. /s
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