I went to my parents house with my son. He was 4. They turned on cartoons. Then he said, "Dad why'd you change the show? I don't want to watch this." It was a commercial. I had to explain commercials to my son. It was at that moment I realized how much of my tv watching as a kid was commercials.
After subscribing to YouTube Premium, I had a similar revelation. Now if only we could have a google ad-free subscription which would turn off all google search and display network ads, our lives would be so much better! What if we could have cities outlaw advertising on billboards and instead collect a small tax to make up for the lost revenue, how much would our quality of life increase? That makes me wonder, if we could ever get to such an utopia, what avenues would advertisers have left to sell products to us?
Inoculate yourself and others from the effects of advertising by saying something negative about the brand whenever you see the ad.
Ex. I saw a Mazda ad. "Mazdas are the perfect car for when you want to look like a complete idiot while burning to death in your poorly manufactured deathtrap."
Could you use a concrete example?
US airports are creepy as hell, especially places like Atlanta that have constant CNN blaring like the telescreen in 1984, and of course there is much disgusting advertising, but I never noticed any overt "NLP."
Shit loads of advertising and "serving those who serve you" - referring to mil arty veterans in one airport. But i guess that's the point in NLP, you arebn't supposed to notice it. It was only after reading some books on it that I noticed it as often.
Thanks, I suppose now that you mention it that is a bit creepy and Orwellian. Generally speaking, American airports are the most totalitarian and creepy and uncomfortable in the world. The telescreen blaring, the insane security line, the ads ... stuff like the insane murals in the Denver airport -I'll add that to my list of bloody awful things American flyers put up with.
I find I do this automatically now. Whenever I see an ad the only thing I remember is not to buy whatever they are selling. For shows, I won't watch them. I even cancelled Netflix over their automatic trailers playing. Hulu is next with their unskippable commercials even on the 'ad free' plan
Seems odd to also remove what appear to be signs for retail businesses on the walls of the business itself, but maybe I’m interpreting the before and after images incorrectly.
Those are allowed but have limited dimensions, doesn't matter the size of your storefront you can only have a logo of a certain size, lots of loopholes like the McDonald's M or putting huge logos inside a glass wall but in general it is followed.
The article has a line about how local art got a boost. Did many artists never get a chance just because our collective minds were preoccupied with product advertising? Is the presence of advertising an important distinguishing factor when we compare the current age to the Renaissance period?
Just a thing - São Paulo was the city without ads. Now, state owned boards abound in the city. But it's still much better than any other city I've ever seen in the world.
In addition to blocking ads, I used Adblock to remove the html for the recommended videos panel that shows up to the right or underneath a playing video. I’ve definitely noticed a personal reduction in wormhole clicking YouTube usage.
I find uBlock works well at blocking YouTube ads but occasionally I get a static screen in the video player that says something like “Service not available at the moment.”.
YT seems to be intermittently blocking UBO users.
I never reproduced such issue on my side, so unfortunately there is no way for me to investigate -- given that this affects different blockers with different code base, I suspect a filter issue.
Disabling it temporarily always fixes the problem, so I have assumed it is due to UBO blocking something which if YT sees has been blocked enough times for a specific visitor, they will prevent video from loading, but maybe my hypothesis is incorrect. This only happens when I’m watching a lot of YouTube videos one after the other.
I seem to recall that if you disable uBlock on a site, you have to reload for the change to take effect. Is it possible that the page reload and not disabling uBlock is doing it?
This reminded me of Elysium: but instead of the rich being the only ones able to receive quality health care, here they are the only ones able to afford a reprieve from these mind numbing ads.
I would love to be able to eliminate all ads in my life. At the same time, doesn't this feel a little like the advertisers are extorting us for some $$? Lest they jam more ads down your throat.
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
AFAIK here in NL they did ask for permission, from the government. The government happily gives these even though they make our roads less safe. Meanwhile, people who use a (smart)phone whilst driving get a fine. Why do the billboards remain on the road? Why are there electronic billboards in the bus? Why can't I enjoy the scenery, or read my book instead?
I've eliminated all virtual ads in my life, at least, and I typically ignore in-person ads subconsciously. I don't have a cable subscription, I pay for every platform/tool I use, etc. I also run an ad blocker, though I try to be careful about making sure I'm paying for something that's valuable to me.
I don't really feel extorted. These things are usually services provided to me, services that probably would not exist without revenue, whether by ads or subscriptions.
I will say this: there are times where I feel somewhat disconnected as a result, especially when it comes to entertainment. Like, I saw Avengers: Endgame without having seen Captain Marvel first... because I didn't know Captain Marvel was being released. It didn't show up on any of my social media, I guess, or I missed it if it did.
Similarly, I've missed new seasons of shows I cared about. No political ads - sometimes people refer to local ads in casual conversation and I'm mostly lost. Stuff like that.
It's sort of eye-opening to realize how much information is disseminated via ads/media. I mean, it's obvious in retrospect, right? But to experience it, well, it's something.
I quit most social media a few months ago and have always blocked ads the best I could, and I completely agree. A sense of alienation is felt.
What's more, is that I "realize" that none of the things I was missing really matter. I do not care, at all, that I missed Captain marvel. Nor that I missed my favourite TV show -- I can always watch it later, if I really want to.
Seeing other people then care about such trivialities is a novel experience too.
Nowadays, the source of most of my pop culture current events is my SO. She applies her own hereustics, and (mostly) genuinelyy interesting pieces of info are what pass through her to me. She's getting it via top Instagram/Facebook/YouTube posts anyway. I find this system much better than the earlier one.
That's a personal attack and also breaks this guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart? This comment and the two or three previous ones you posted have been breaking it.
> At the same time, doesn't this feel a little like the advertisers are extorting us for some $$? Lest they jam more ads down your throat.
They wouldn't have succeeded in this extortion (online) if it wasn't for companies with billions of dollars hiring the smartest people in the world to enable advertisers to spy on people en-masse.
To supply a supporting anecdote: as a cis male, I'm consistently served ads for female-products like tampons on Instagram, presumably one of the "smartest" spies out there
If AR becomes a reality, this will become all the more acute. Public advertising is currently limited by physical boundaries. Hyperreality [0] sets a clear vision for one possible future.
It's not like advertisers pay for the services from their own money. They 'basically' force you to buy the stuff which they advertise and take that money to pay the service.
It took me years to train my brain to not read outdoor advertisement. I can't stop it from seeing/interpreting images, but I can successfully ignore text/letters which are less than a meter in size.
Yes, you can. You can use a different browser such as Mozilla Firefox, or use DNS-based blocking such as Pi-Hole. I use both of these, and use WireGuard to reach my Pi-Hole. If I have a network connection, I have an adblocker.
Sounds like a horrible feature. Selecting data makes you Google it? What if you copy/paste a password. Vimium does it right for me, but requires physical keyboard.
Selecting text in my world is either copying text, or selecting text. Not searching for that text on a search engine. That shouldn't be the default (most common) keybind.
Anyway, you can still use DNS-based (with or without VPN) filtering.
The idea is basically that you pay the publisher out of your own pocket for their ad space, to buy your own impression. This might be a great product if it covers the majority of ad inventories...
I've been enjoying YouTube Red/Premium for about a year and a half but I'm kind of considering cancelling it to go back to using an adblocker for YouTube's embedded ads and supporting specific creators via Patreon or something. The majority of the channels I watch embed their own ad-reads into their videos now so the ad-free value proposition for Premium is getting much weaker for me.
I was considering it too and I don't understand why Google doesn't force the creators to mark up when the ads start and end so it could just jump over them for people who pay YouTube Premium to specifically get rid of ads. People like us will stop paying go with a adblocker.
I cancelled my Google Play Music family subscription (of which I was the only user at that point) and then signed up for a normal subscription. Didn't realize doing so lost my bundled Youtube Red subscription in the process. Started getting midroll ads on YouTube on my phone and couldn't figure out why...
As someone who only uses YouTube for music I'm glad that embedded ads are not a thing for music channels. YouTube Premium is worth a thousand times more than any Spotify subscription.
> what avenues would advertisers have left to sell products to us?
My serious guess would be even more paid shills. It's amazing how much more weight a message can have when it comes from someone that's not obviously tied to the company.
My skepticism level is now of epic proportions when I see someone recommending products online. Louis Rossmann is one notable exception, but far too rare.
These days I usually just type "reviews for XXX reddit", but even that isn't a sure thing anymore.
Yup, I do the "[search query] + reddit" in my searches as well. Just including the phrase on its own brings up a ton of garbage sites with reviews written by content marketing people for SEO purposes as opposed a 3-4 line Reddit comment.
> What if we could have cities outlaw advertising on billboards and instead collect a small tax to make up for the lost revenue
To me there is something seriously wrong with this way of thought. Why would we collect a small tax to make up for businesses' lost profit? It sounds, to me, downright bizarre, like saying forcing factories to be more environmentally friendly would cost money to the business and cut profits so we should take that money from the taxpayers. Wow.
> if we could have cities outlaw advertising on billboards and instead collect a small tax to make up for the lost revenue, how much would our quality of life increase?
Ideally decisions would instead be made based on unbiased reviews and rational decision making.
Hopefully the lack of advertising would relieve us from unconscious decision fatigue and free up our energy for other parts of life.
We have a ban on billboards in our town in Indiana of all places, its definitely possible. It is nice as well, I always forget how annoying they are until I travel to other cities.
I think it would create a sort of a monopoly -- the municipal taxes paying the ad-free tithe. I imagine corruption and backroom deals would result in that cost going up and up over time.
A better solution would be to outlaw ads / billboards, and ticket the offenders to offset the lost income from billboards etc. Municipalities love new revenue streams.
Instead of banning a particular avenue of advertising, which moves the advertising spend to somewhere else, why not have a broad-based tax on advertising spending?
We've seen how ineffective things like banning advertising to children were on reducing smoking, while raising taxes on cigarettes was quite effective at reducing smoking levels. And some advertising is useful. I don't need no advertising in my life, I just need less of it. Taxes would reduce the "arm's race" effect where companies need to advertise because their competitors are advertising. I suspect that the quality of advertising would go up if it were more expensive, as well.
Perhaps at some point in the future, we will have too little advertising and there will need to be a debate on how we should reduce the advertising tax. I long for this day.
But smoking rates have been dropping, and the tobacco companies certainly put up a huge fight here in Aus when we tried to enforce plain packaging on cigarettes, so they're spending an awful lot of resources on fighting something that 'doesn't work'...(hint: it does)
That world exists with ad blockers. Was viewing a friend's computer who didn't have an ad blocker installed and almost forgot what it had been like to see ads plastered everywhere online.
> what avenues would advertisers have left to sell products to us?
Maybe pay me some money for my attention? In exchange you get all the data from me: how much money I spend on X. How often I do Y. Whatever helps you sell your product to me. If you succeed and I like your ad or buy your product, the ad is for free. Otherwise you pay me some €/$/coins.
Transformers is great advertising - it delivered good entertainment value, it made the toys more fun to play with because your imagination had already seen a bunch of Transformers stories play out.
Contrast this with cable TV ads if you haven't watched cable TV in a while. Annoying, gimmicky, manipulative.
I don't have a problem with commercials on principle - I have a problem with how they're implemented. Banner ads on website that give me good content for free? Great! Informing me there are hot MILFs in my area while I'm pair-programming with my boss? No thanks.
I don't know how many PJ Masks toys and shirts I've bought based on that show.
The thing that got me as a kid was seeing all the cool food everyone else got that my parents wouldn't give me. I just wanted hot pockets in my house like they had. Kids will always want toys like the shows they like. But the other stuff isn't necessary.
I'd say if a kids show is not on public television it most likely is a commercial for a toy or a vehicle for a number of other ads for unrelated toys.
And even for me and my five year old, there is plenty of Danial Tiger gear out there to buy! The difference is they make and sell the toys but they don't advertise them during the show. It's not much but that subtle difference is what allows me to sit down and watch 30 - 60 minutes of these shows a few times a week with her.
As others have mentioned, even NetFlix "sells toys", just not overtly like network TV does. But just watching PJ Max, Trolls, etc. makes my five year old grand daughter want everything she sees when we go to any store that has these shows' stuff for sale.
Both of them are still better than numbing their minds with 8-12 minutes of intense, flashy commercials for every 30 minute show they watch though.
One of the reasons I got Netflix, and one of the reasons why I want to get rid of cable TV (I can't get internet without cable TV). However I am getting tired of the autoplay functions in Netflix. They. Are. Annoying.
Commercials for children are a cancer to society. They're a distraction and a waste of our precious time. Parents don't want it (they got enough on their hands as it is), children don't want it (it isn't content, they get manipulated).
While I will protect my children (and myself) from any commercials, its also good to teach them that not everything they notice is truth or can be achieved/bought.
In Québec, the Consumer Protection Act prohibits commercial advertising directed at children under 13 years of age. One negative effect is that this has made it very hard for genuine educational companies to grow. It is hard to market a product that teach kids to code if you cannot show the product to kids.
You can but even then you risk not following the rules correctly.
> The Consumer Protection Act prohibits advertising that targets children. To determine whether
advertising is directed at them, the Act stipulates that it is necessary to take into account the
context of the advertisement’s presentation and the impression it gives.
> The Act also provides three criteria that correspond to the following questions:
> • For whom are the advertised goods or services intended? Do they appeal to children?
> • Is the advertisement designed to attract the attention of children?
> • Are children targeted by the advertisement or exposed to it? Are they present at the
time and place it appears or is broadcast?
[...]
> Goods or services essentially intended for children and that therefore appeal to them. Ex.: certain video games, toys or candy primarily consumed by children.
> The ad must not:
> • be designed in a way that appeals
to children;
> • be broadcast or distributed in a place
where or at a time when children are
normally reached.
[...]
> The fact that an advertisement or advertising method appears to target adults does not mean
that the advertisement is intended exclusively for them. Following an analysis of the two other
criteria, an advertisement that attracts the attention of children can still be considered as
advertising directed at children even though it seems to target adults because of its verbal or
written content. That may be the case if the product advertised appeals to children.
So you could advertise a coding educational product during commercials of a late-night talk show, that talk about the educational benefits of the product?
"Educational companies" is a narrow enough industry where advertising to the appropriate market segments while excluding children is entirely possible. If you sell educational products, you wouldn't be advertising on a kid's cartoon show, you'd be doing it on channels where adults with wallets would convene.
Teacher's unions publications/newsletters would be a no-brainer, as would popular blogs or Youtube channels focused on child-rearing.
I came to say something similar. My child gets irate when she sees an ad, esp when she plays a free to play game on the iphone and I forget to put the phone in airplane mode.
Granted, my son now wants toys based on this "new" show he was watching and is sad to find out that toys for this are no longer made and the only ones that exist are collectibles.
Brand marketing towards children is a real and effective thing. There was a study done on wrapping basic food (carrots/apples) in McDonalds branding and kids said it tasted better [1]. Always seemed scary to me.
Glad my kids don't have the same amount of brainwashing as I did. However, we have our own generational problems to deal with, like YouTube "merch" begging, clickbaiting, etc. Now that I think about it, maybe I'd rather they'd see TV adverts...
Same my son grew up on Netflix, we were watching the Super Bowl on OTA tv when he was 5 and he asked the same thing, what's this? Oh that's a commercial.
He also picked up that when we search a toy on amazon, afterward there would be an ad on the side of YouTube for the same toy, he pointed and asked how they did that. This was around the same time, he was 5 or 6.
When I was a kid, our evening TV was always Sesame Street -> Klokhuis (a pop-sci-ish program for kids) -> Jeugdjournaal (news presented in an accessible way for kids), and after that it's my dad's turn to watch the real news at 8.
All those shows still exist, and recently we did that again, and we were all baffled by how much commercials we had to watch. Dutch public TV has commercials, and that's looking increasingly odd now that we're all so used to Netflix. My son was calling to skip it, but we couldn't.
Why not go further and get rid of TV? The problems it creates seem to greatly outweigh any little benefits. And most of the benefits can be gotten with books anyway, which also has more benefits.
I've never seen or heard of that documentary and probably neither have my kids, but we seem to get along just fine without it.
Also we don't have TV and less than a year ago got rid of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, our home internet connection, our mobile internet connections, and our landline telephone.
I find that now we read a lot more books and talk a lot more and explore the world around us more often and more actively. And we all like to share the exciting new things we learn about, them from school and us from reading at home. So there's no shortage of learning from lack of TV.
Genuinely curious, how are you planning to handle the future in which your kids go to college and move out of your house? Do you feel like they will be adequately prepared to deal with the world that has internet, Netflix, smartphones, etc.? To me, this situation reminds of all those sheltered kids with overprotective parents, who went off the rails once they got to college, because they were not prepared to handle well all those new options they were "protected" from by their parents.
Right now is the time for us to teach them self-control and self-restraint, and we do that in little ways that get bigger over time. As all virtues, if you sharpen it against one thing, it'll be sharper for the next thing. Those devices will probably be one of those ways they can practice as they get old enough, but with supervision of course.
The idea is, if you give a kid a solid foundation for a happy life by the time they're a young adult, so that they have a formula and a recipe for a life that they feel completely satisfied with, they won't feel unfulfilled and like life is missing something when they become adults, which is the biggest motivator for people adopting bad habits, especially the bad habits of their peers. So that's my job. Give them a good, full life now, and teach them how to navigate life while making it good and full in wholesome and rewarding ways. Then trust them to make these decisions as adults. And guide them through it the whole time. My job won't end when they're 18 or 81. I'm always their father and role model and guide, til the day I die.
I think a lot of "shared experience" stuff in the network tv era included the ads. I still remember advertising songs and things like the big mac ingredients.
"Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun!" I hadn't thought of that one for decades. I could feel bad about not memorizing Shakespeare instead, but I also have MANY numerical constants in permastore from the same era, so I can't complain too much.
I had that same experience with my daughter—it was Thanksgiving, so we put on the Macy's Day Parade 'cause hey, giant balloons. And then a commercial came on and she asked me to put the balloons back.
Couldn't agree more, and when a lot of kids are doing that you can imagine how much of an effect it has on peer pressure and what is considered a cool toy to have.
Even just in my own personal life, I've heard similar stories from more than one person. I've also both heard and personally witnessed with my own kids them trying to manipulate the primary TV of the house like it's a touchscreen, so I'm sure that's a story that's independently happened many hundreds of thousands of times by now, if not millions.
(I don't have a cute story, though. They just tried it once, I told them it didn't work that way, please stop smearing the TV with your hands, and they stopped. No cute questions or comments about the TV being "broken".)
Until it's not and they advertise anyway. Netflix has adopted the pay and advertise anyway model. The advertising in this case is the product you've already paid for, which is still annoying and bothersome. Apparently, they are trying to work off the success of AOL.
Also, some relative gave us some kids' VHS tapes and I still had a player so I figured why not? Well, let me tell you why not: Nobody has time for rewinding to take place and the low-quality video and audio is quaint, but it's dead tech. The VCR and all the tapes got recycled shortly thereafter.
VHS could be stopped where you wanted to stop. Who hasn’t played the frustrating dance where streamed video buffers, plays some other part or jumps back to where you were.
VHS rwd and ffw buttons just worked.
If that's your goal, wouldn't it be better to just pause the TV every 10 minutes or so for a few minutes at a time? That would have the same effect in terms of delaying gratification, and it's strictly better because you're not exposing your child to commercials.
Pausing the TV every 10 minutes is much harder as a parent on many different levels.
Commercials can teach kids about long term instant gratification when it comes to toys. If they want something they see on TV, then they can wait until their birthday/Christmas to get it and decide which ones they want most.
They can also learn that often toys on TV seem more fun than they are in real life. They can learn to be more skeptical when it comes to advertising through experience.
Commercials are not really the problem. It is spoiling kids and buying them something every time they demand it that causes issues.
were the ads really all that bad though? I don't remember asking for much more than video games, board games, hungry hungry hippos, McDonalds, Sunny D, etc.
Kids today get crazy ads on Instagram and are asking for Supreme shirts, Yeezus shoes, Kylie Jenner makeup kits.
Yes, they were that bad and were getting worse. By the late 90's, most ads directed at young children were reminiscent of a bad acid trip. Flashing lights and colors, non-stop quick-cuts and people literally screaming over and over for you, a child of 6 or 7 years, to BUY THE THING! YOU GOTTA HAVE IT! COLLECT THEM ALL!
It was absolutely terrifying and we should all be collectively ashamed for allowing it to persist and to happen in the first place.
Sure, you can, but most parents don't say no every time, and that means sometimes asking's going to pay off.
Some of the "kidfluencer" content out there is clearly aimed at giving kids talking points to bring to their parents. Before we banned YouTube from the house a few years back, I had a couple experiences where my kids would come and give me canned marketing copy - "it's fun and educational for the whole family!" sort of nonsense - they'd clearly cribbed off a video.
…sure, the ads make them seem fun. Maybe kids these days want special clothes instead of McDonald’s and Sunny D? (those things are good for what they are but not great in any objective sense. Neither are clothes, but that’s kind of my point.) Also from experience of my younger sibling and my cousins, those ads (and things) are mostly seen and desired by teenagers, which is morally questionable in different ways.
I went to my parents house with my son. He was 4. They turned on cartoons. Then he said, "Dad why'd you change the show? I don't want to watch this." It was a commercial. I had to explain commercials to my son. It was at that moment I realized how much of my tv watching as a kid was commercials.