By this point in humanity's development, their brains had developed the ability to automatically block the parts of reality screaming for their attention, results of an economic system based on coercive consumption. Attention grabbers bifurcated into subtle, nefarious actors intent on slipping past in-brain ad-blocking and the shouters, turning up the volume and animations to make ads impossible to not see. People were subtly crippled, partially blind, now. Yet it was, after all, the mind's defense mechanism against an increasingly hostile environment trying to rob it of its most precise resource: attention.
That was, of course, until they banned psychic violence in the "Goddamn, get out of my brain" amendment in the late 21st century.
I won't lie, the fact that my brain seamlessly adblocks pages at no cost to myself mostly strikes me as cool. Like ideally you wouldn't have to, but God knows I'm half blind with everything I ignore regardless (including headers which seem irrelevant, most introductions, every third word, etc), so like who cares.
Yup; same here. It started with the earliest intrusive ads. At this point you could display a big purple banner on my screen and then 60 seconds later break into my office, put $60million on the desk, a gun to my head, and ask the content of the banner to keep the money and not get shot, and you'd likely have to shoot me.
I'd like to have an eye tracking study done on my viewing because the brain has a separate center that controls direction of gaze that is not part of the visual cortex that processes sight. With a normal human subject looking at a normal scene, an eye-tracking study will reveal in a few seconds the outlines of everything in the scene, trees, doors, windows, people, etc. because the eye tracks the interesting parts and edges.
Also relevant is the fact that only a tiny section at the center of the field of vision is actually in any kind of focus - you cannot read anything resembling normal sized type with your peripheral vision.
There's also the phenomenon of 'blind sight' where with people who are cortically blind, i.e., their eyes and optic nerves work, but their visual cortex doesn't (e.g., due to head injury to that part of the brain) When shows a panel of vertical or horizontal stripes in a forced choice test (i.e., they can answer "vertical" or "horizontal" but not "I don't know"), they answer correctly at rates much higher than chance (iirc from courses a decades ago, ~70%). It was thought that they might be unconsciously extracting the H/V information from the area that still controlled the gaze direction.
I'm wondering how many of us have 'ad-blindness' that isn't just filtering our visual input, but is actually guiding our gaze away from intrusive content so we literally never see it because the focal area never rests on it.
Anyone more up to date on neuroscience have any info?
Yes. Eyetracking is rather useless as what we see depends on the task we have to perform. We filter out what we don't need and don't even register it consciously. As such, general eye tracking studies can only tell you so much... Case in point: dancing gorilla awareness test, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.
Yes, filtering inputs is important and happens at every level of the sensory, nervous, and brain systems. I'm describing two substantially different levels of filtering and the dancing gorilla test isn't the one I'm focused on here, as it's the high-level attention filtering, as the gorilla is surely not filtered out by the subconscious eye motions (i.e., never seen), but filtered out by the higher-level attention mechanisms. I expect that much ad-blindness is indeed these high-level mechanisms.
What I'm wondering is if after decades of avoidance training, the separate gaze-orientation center (I forget it's proper name right now) which is subconscious and separate from the visual cortex, is trained enough to minimize the eye's gaze in the annoying areas such that the focus point never lands on them and they never get the opportunity to be read (and ignored by the higher level mechanisms). Eye tracking studies using actual eye tracks and not merely heatmaps would tell us the difference - if the tracks still follow the edges, bright spots, etc. into the adverts, then all the 'blindness' is cortical, but if the eye tracks avoid the ad zones, it's been trained down to a lower level.
Ah, I see. I think you are correct on that one. One could even say 'banner blindness' was was caused google to be successful in the beginning. Then, after a decade or so, people also became google ads blind. As a result the google ads became increasingly more like organic search results, until now, where you almost an't see the difference.
Which is 100% an intentional dark pattern designed to maximize profits for the ad economy by tricking you into looking at something you don't want to look at. If users liked ads and found them useful, their brains wouldn't automatically learn to tune them out. On the contrary, if ads were so valuable to users, it would be a plus to make it easier to see them!
I mean, search engines throw an absolutely enormous amount of computational power at "organically" discovering, classifying, indexing, and searching the entire internet for the most relevant and useful results, and then the dollar machine instantly demotes them below paid placement. The cognitive dissonance is astounding.
> the fact that my brain seamlessly adblocks pages at no cost to myself
I wouldn’t be so sure it’s at no cost, it seems possible that parsing/blocking a lot of that stuff causes some kind of mental/sensory strain or fatigue.
It's somewhat automatic, but definitely not cost-free. Spend awhile with uBlock Origin and optionally something like PiHole, and you'll be amazed at how much less exhausting reading online is.
I read web content via all sorts of apps that aren’t web browsers (mail, rss reader, various electron junk, not to mention mobile apps that are simply skins over web pages). A browser plug-in doesn’t help for those cases.
uBlock Origin catches almost all of it, but PiHole catches the rest. Also great for devices which cannot run an ad-blocker. (Mobile apps, smart TVs, etc)
I doubt it's as cost-free as you imagine. Rather than regale you with an ADHD perspective, I'll just say you're probably still reading it but just not thinking about it consciously. I would make a small bet that it's easier to prime a person with targeted advertising if they generally don't pay attention.
I recently emailed a museum to ask about tours since they didn't have any information on their website. They replied with links to all the information on their website, that was in literal plain sight, but that I totally and completely missed because my brain just straight adblocked them. I almost had to force myself to "see" them. They just so closely matched that ad spam you see at the bottom of news sites and blogs that I'd just keep skimming past them.
My experience using tools to remove unnecessary / intrusive webpage elements (directly through the Element Inspector, via CSS managers such as Stylus, or the uBlock Origin element-blocking tool.
Even non-advertising elements such as social-media icons, related articles lists, sidebars, and the like. The more the display is limited to simply the text I intend to read, the less stress and distraction I feel.
Virtually all studies of multitasking show that multitaskers both overestimate their abilities and their performance is negatively affected by the attempt.
Actually I have ADHD and I suspect I mentally ad block even more than most people. They are given 0 attention and focus because they are a dumb boring thing
I have difficulty blocking out the sound from ads which have audio, and they seem to bother me noticeably more than they bother most people, but visual ads I just tune out altogether.
When you try to add something to your amazon shopping cart, you frequently get an "extended warranty" popup. If you just close the window/tab, the item silently doesn't make it to your shopping cart.
I don't know how many things go unpurchased because of this.
I'd rather be middle class in a developed country now than any king 200 years ago. No amount of wealth could have gotten me modern medicine, especially anesthesia(!). Even stuff that's now trivial like pretty fresh tropical fruit or good food from other countries in general would have been very hard to come by. I have way more knowledge and entertainment at my finger tips than any medieval king could have ever dreamed of.
To each his own. But look at all the wonderful things that medieval kings commissioned to keep themselves occupied. Art, music, cathedrals, palaces, sports, plays, libraries, etc. The impact of a (generous) medieval king in terms of things others could eventually enjoy far outpaces this age's netflix consumption.
That the same Henry VIII who shut down all the monasteries, which for most of the population were the only source of anything resembling medical and social care? Karma's a bitch.
IMO it's an interesting topic if the kings were in fact "generous" when they commissioned these things. I think there is an argument that these investments were mostly for their own legacy and that the resources could have been spent more efficiently to raise everyone's standard of living or reduce poverty. IMO just spending every cent possible on research to get non-terrible medicine would be far and away the highest priority. But of course I only say that because I know from today's perspective what is possible.
Most of the middle ages probably wasn't that bad, but the civilization-destroying plague destroyed civilization, and Renaissance-era propagandists exploited the living memory of the plague to make themselves look better.
In fairness, in those cases, when they romanticize the thieves, they usually try to make clear that they're only taking the bank/casino's owners and are careful not to hurt anyone.
Yeah, if you live in a city, you're conditioned to ignore people trying to get your attention. Nothing is free. Don't believe it. I remember one time my little brother from my tiny hometown was visiting me in LA and I warned him to ignore the guy with the CDs. Don't let him put it in your hand and avoid eye contact. Told my sister the same thing but she didn't believe me and lost 20$ to a shitty mixtape in a millisecond. Those guys are slick. haha
You can't say the same thing about the Bazaar because that's why you went to the Bazaar. The shouts are what's going to be directing your entire journey. That's why ads aren't annoying in a trade magazine, because the ads are probably the reason you bought the trade magazine; the articles are commentary on the ads.
Accurate. And in a trade magazine, most the ads are making a value proposition of some sort; the ones that are purely based on emotional appeals tend to end up as industry memes, synonymous with vacuity.
This started becoming common in shopping malls at some point during the aughts or 2010s.
Usually accompanied by large in-corridor vendor displays which further obstructed already-crowded walkways.
I stopped going to malls.
High-street shopping districts still don't affect me to the same viscerally-negative degree. Even those which seem to be fairly consciously emulating and attempting to create a mall-like atmosphere. There's something about the open-air nature, and the fact that sounds attenuate rather than echoing off hard surfaces from all sides.
In NYC you're mostly trained just to ignore people trying to get your attention. Or at least I was. I assume ignoring banner ads is a similar phenomenon.
Existence by David Brin carried similar concepts. Augmented Reality infested with ads, where the kids in the know all ran blockers and basically opted out of a varying levels of consensus reality.
I fed that comment to Sudowrite and here is where the AI went with it:
----------
As the struggle for survival had escalated over the past few millennia, the human brain had developed a miraculous defense mechanism: the psychic immune system. Simply said, the psychic immune system regulated the production of thoughts and emotions to a sustainable level. But with the new law came a new synthetic freedom to attack the underlying problem of an economy based on coercive consumption. Marketers and advertisers, wielding their mental weaponry, had been on the offensive, attacking minds of the world's citizens unabated. Psychic immune systems, no matter how strong, were helpless against the onslaught.
Now that the psychic immune system had been weakened, everyone was a potential target for propaganda and mind control.
In the following chaos, advertising mutated into a new form. The ban on psychic violence was not comprehensive, and included exemptions for images used in the furtherance of scientific, educational and artistic works. To survive, the advertisers had to learn to speak the language of art. They were the only ones left with the knowledge to speak it.
> The ban on psychic violence was not comprehensive, and included exemptions for images used in the furtherance of scientific, educational and artistic works. To survive, the advertisers had to learn to speak the language of art.
I'm impressed by the AI. It's actually what would happen if this law was introduced. There would be exceptions, and the advertisers would find ways to exploit them.
Heh, there’s a part of Better Call Saul where an attorney is trying to get an artistic exemption to apply so a bank’s gaudy logo/statue can be bigger than normally allowed.
Ironically, worse than the deluge of advertising described in this comment is the attempted redefinition of language for political agendas as exemplified in this comment.
Both are a form of psychic warfare - except that while I have seen non-intrusive and useful forms of advertising (i.e. product discovery, not trying to brainwash me into believing that Coca-Cola isn't unhealthy), I have never seen a non-malicious instance of this kind of hostile language redefinition.
The poster was clearly writing a jocular, one-sentence sci-fi story to express how they felt violated by the constant vieing for their attention. That's why it's _set in the future_ and regarding a _fictional constitutional amendment_. Making up words is a genre trope of sci-fi.
The second is that languages just change and people make up words. This isn't unique to the political arena and isn't necessarily malicious. Every term you have ever used exists because someone needed it, didn't have it, and so they made it up. You'll need to actually argue that introducing a term is harmful or deceptive in the particular instance that it happens.
This is pearl-clutching to portray people you disagree with as being shrill and ridiculous and not worth listening to. It's a bad faith tactic which you should desist from.
ETA: Because I seem to be earlier in the sort order, I want to point out that there is a much more important third reason is a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016181
I was shocked that there were five comments saying something other than this before yours.
It's like how the people who talked about safe spaces and triggering being dumb were triggered by every single commercial, tv show, movie, news report, and passing conversation and begging for the stuff that triggered them to be removed.
"Go woke, go broke" is something said by people who are threatening to boycott businesses because of their triggering content.
par for the course, and embedded in all political discourse.
Recently we started calling anyone proposing higher taxes a socialist, which indicates total illiteracy, as it has no bearing on centrally planned economy
Laws that stop business defrauding customers are called 'consumer protection' and 'red tape', but when we protect business from individuals it's called being tought on crime.
When you make an extra copy of a song, you commit intellectual property theft, and the state can prosecute you for free and put you in jail, and you are a criminal.
When a company does not provide warranty you paid for, its called a business dispute and you have to hire your own lawyer.
> When you make an extra copy of a song, you commit intellectual property theft
Don't forget "piracy"--associating copying information with looting a ship and killing everyone on board. I'd love to see an end to this ridiculous modern usage of this word.
> Recently we started calling anyone proposing higher taxes a socialist, which indicates total illiteracy, as it has no bearing on centrally planned economy
This too is ironically it's own redefinition because originally (and still to many socialists today) socialism means workers' ownership of the means of the production, which undemocratic centrally planning states never were and never could be.
The reason people associate socialism with taxes and a centrally planned economy is because that's the only popular socialism.
Anarcho-socialism rejects statism (totally agreeable) but doesn't offer a credible alternative. That's why common people don't even think about anarchy when you talk about socialism.
In a centrally planned socialist economy, the people in power can steal resources from the workers (like all the governments of the world do nowadays) and exercise power.
In anarcho socialism the power would be decentralised and distributed among democratic groups of workers. Why would the workers even bother to take all these decisions? They're not gaining power (or very little, due to the rightful decentralised nature of power in anarchy) nor currency.
The assumption is that workers are perfect human beings and don't need incentives do to the right thing, which is a pipe dream.
> socialism with taxes and a centrally planned economy
Taxes have nothing to do with socialism and have existed in Feudalism, in ancient Egypt and in every 'capitalist' state. Just because you collected money, does not mean you need to centrally plan how to spend it - carbon dividend would tax things that produce CO2, and distribute it equally to all citizen. Someone who produces no CO2 would get paid, and someone who produces the average amount would see no change.
I have no problem with central planning being associated, it was a key feature of socialist states. But Central planning means government sets prices on Salami, like USSR did, and I never came across anyone in the West proposing that.
At most someone advocates for some infrastructure, and they get called a socialist. But then, why does no capitalism society privatise the police, the army, the navy, the judges that sit in court, the federal reserve, the public library and the patent office?
If the accuser does advocates for privatising them, the rest of society will call him a nutcase and move on with their lives.
So he must instead make up excuses, of various levels of absurdity, for why free market can't be trusted with managing elementary building blocks of society here, but it's socialist to suggest government should step in over there.
The only solution is to Stop accusing everyone of being a socialist in disguise and learn from history and other countries: we have tried societies without government-managed police and courtsm, the results were terrible. We have tried private prisons, and government-managed consumer goods, also terrible.
The explanations like banner blindness, etc. make sense to me, but I think there's still a problem in our society or species in general that people simply do not read things thoroughly. And when confronted with a problem, instead of going back and reading things thoroughly, they blame someone else.
How many of us software engineers have had this exact experience: Someone runs into an issue with your software that can't be papered over because of inherent complexity, and they report the problem to you. You tell them the solution, and they tell you it should be documented. You tell them it is documented, and you even tell them where. They tell you it should be more prominent.
I've had this happen where the warning was in bright red, bold letters at top in a separate box that said "WARNING!" but even after I sent them the link telling them it was documented, they still didn't see it.
I'm sure this banner could improved. I'm not sure the problem could have ever been avoided or solved entirely.
> I think there's still a problem in our society or species in general that people simply do not read things thoroughly.
We're overwhelmed with shit to read. Most of it poorly written. Almost none of it important. Combine with the tendency (in some societies—notably, the US is possibly the most like this) to post rules and notices and disclaimers on everything, and we become blind even to things that look like they might be important—because they almost never are.
WARNING: This product can expose you to chemicals including arsenic, which is known to the State of California to cause cancer. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.
I've heard a tinfoil take that this is intentional malicious compliance to cause banner blindness. If you put the warning on everything then you can sell dangerous materials because people won't be checking the label. If you label everything "WARNING: Contains Dihydrogenmonoxide" then people will ignore it when it says "WARNING: Contains Lead"
I've had exactly one time where prop 65 notified me of lead in food. Everything else has been histrionic. I can't help but wonder if there was a concerted effort to make these warnings as useless as they are.
Also, documentation is almost always written for the beginner, with lots of boiler plate. Which means trying to separate the wheat from the chaffe is quite difficult, and I don't want to read your back ground on "what are containers?" If your software is just like another piece of software, and 18 of the components do the same thing they do in another piece of software, and the 19th is named the same as something else and works completely differently, I'm going to get frustrated if there's no straightforward easy to find explanation.
It’s funny because I usually run into the exact opposite. All documentation seems to be like Unix man pages. It only makes sense if you’re already an expert at it. If you’re not, then it makes no sense and if it does have the answer, you’ll never be able to understand it.
Then that points to another problem: that the people who have this adaptation aren't doing anything to eliminate its necessity (e.g. contacting their representative about dumb labels on things, or sending negative feedback to a website that has a bunch of useless text on it).
Because those are completely ineffective ways to get anything accomplished, and have no reward even if they are successful.
It's important to remember that activists are people who are working for free. The economic incentives for me to get a website or product to e.g. remove intrusive ads or pointless warnings are completely negative: it's a waste of my time and/or money.
That's the purpose of government, so we don't have to take on these things as atomized individuals. There's no economic incentive for me to build an inch of highway.
Fixing it's probably as much cultural as legal. On the legal side, a full fix would probably involve moving away from common law, which is a tall order.
Yes. The biggest problem for me is getting people to read the contents of my emails. There's nothing more infuriating than trying to get an answer to a nuanced question, only to be met with a response which doesn't actually pertain to what you were asking. Or worse: when you answer someone's question completely, and they respond with the same question again.
I've been told I'm a very literal person and that's why I have this problem. But I have no idea how to intentionally be non-literal... I will frequently ask someone a yes or no question (e.g. do you want to go out for dinner) and they will tell me a fact that would explain their answer (e.g. she had a big lunch at a work event). So... That's a no?
I had this discussion with my longtime girlfriend (10 years) the other day. She'll frequently say something tangential, but unrelated and my brain will try to make sense of it causing a bit of awkwardness.
One time we were discussing an upcoming trip and she mentions that her friend invited her to come visit another city. How she phrased it made me think she was inviting me on the trip, even though I wasn't really interested, but she made it clear she wasn't. lol. Sometimes I have to sit her down and tell her that I don't mean anything by asking direct awkward questions because I'm just trying to understand if something is implied or not. I can never tell and that's just how she and many other people phrase things.
Sorry for this random comment. I just saw your comment and had to get it off my chest. IDK what I am but I'm the worst at understanding implied things and I fall for jokes all the time.
It's also a clarification between "I would like to, but no thanks due to these other circumstances, maybe another time" vs "No, would not like to, probably not ever." It's also giving you the opportunity to counter-offer, as it were: if you're not particularly hungry either, so maybe something more like a small appetizer and a drink?
Plus a million other options, of course.
It's not really a yes or no question to begin with, even if you're thinking of it that way.
Well to be clear, this isn't for a date, this is a common occurrence with my wife. It really is "do you want to do this tonight or don't you". It could be, "I had a big event today so the last thing I want to do is help cook", it could be "I ate a lot and I'm not hungry". I still don't know if she wants to eat out tonight.
I’m perplexed by similar behavior. People insist on mixing fluff with the substance. Let’s first resolve the substance, shall we? Then we can talk the fluff.
I recall in a previous hacker news thread on a similar topic, one commenter said that their hack for this was to put every sentence on a new line, and that it actually helped with people who would otherwise just skim over what he wrote.
How many of us software engineers have had this experience: you fight a code problem for an hour and then when you figure it out you realize a clear description of the problem was right there in the initial error message the entire time.
We aren't above this or better about it. Knowing what to pay attention to is hard, people develop a huge and complex set of heuristics that sometimes let them down. Failing to account for that adequately may be a problem in our society but I don't think framing it as individuals failing at the virtue of "reading thing thoroughly" will be any kind of solution.
I upvoted you because I appreciate the point you're trying to make. But also: if you're fighting code for an hour without reading the error message, you need to train yourself to start reading those messages right away! This is one of the first things I always work on when pair-programming with junior engineers. Test run fails in the console, they switch back to VS Code, start adding a console.log somewhere, and I say, "What did the error say?" Their debugging time drops by a lot, quickly.
But I think your example still works, because this is something you learn to do through training and experience, not something that you inherently know to do.
This is interesting because I think this happens because alot of the time the error isn't accurate or at the right level of abstraction. I'm wrestling one now where a variable deep in a library isn't defined, so the error message is, "cannot read property main of undefined". But the problem is quite obviously not that I have to submit a pr to the repo to add 'let var'.
But the other 50% of the time.. After a few hours I go back and read the original error message very slowly :-)
Basically, websites like this should be designed the way good journalists write news articles. Put the most important information in the headline. As you move down the article, the information gets less and less important. This allows the user/reader to stop once they have taken in everything they need.
Advertising perverts this. It is by definition the least relevant information on any page, yet is often placed the most prominently. This is why people are conditioned to skip around content trying to find only the relevant bits .
I have this at work all the time. We have a process where we try to guide the user to doing the right thing using a couple of dialogs.
Support gets questions all the time from users which just clicked arbitrarily on the dialogs without reading (we can tell by their questions), leading them into a state they don't want.
At this point I'm seriously considering to replace the dialogs with an interactive text adventure-style thing.
That's because too many sites use dialogs to show of new features or whatever.
Meanwhile I am trying to keep what I was trying to do in my head long enough to put it into the app. I cannot read the dammed popups or I will forget what I was trying to do.
People don't read things thoroughly for good reason: there's too much shit to read. If we read things thoroughly, we'd all waste our lives reading terms of service, user agreements, and fine print, and never get anything of value accomplished. Internet search and ctrl+F are some of the most time-saving inventions are conceived.
> a problem in our society or species in general that people simply do not read things thoroughly. And when confronted with a problem, instead of going back and reading things thoroughly, they blame someone else.
Is this really a "problem in our society or species"? I would say the problem is more that everything around us demands our attention and demands careful consideration, more than we have capacity of attention to give, to the point that we tune out most of it.
There's "fine print" everywhere and if we took the time to really scrutinize most of it, we wouldn't really be getting a lot done.
On top of that, 99% of people have zero chance of understanding all the "fine print" that gets put in front of them, even if they devoted all of their time to reading it.
Well users are one thing but what I am barely able to cope with are coworkers that are illiterate.
Especially in a remote context. In the office face to face communication can be often faster - though even then you need to write stuff down or you will suffer long-term - but remote it just sucks. The whole advantage of being able to work asynchronously gets lost because everything needs to be a call.
So either I get totally exhausted from constant calls that kill my productivity or they get pissed at me for "not communicating enough" when they ignored every single email and JIRA comment.
I think you're generally correct, but I've seen the opposite. Like when the Optimistic Ethereum people swore that they "did their best" to warn users that they would be (very avoidably) deleting transaction history from Etherscan, but that warning was nowhere to be found. Not on their site, blog, twitter, or even discord announcements. Just a few places within discord discussions.
I mean this rather straight, not cynically: I consider the request for "more documentation" to be a political ploy from people who don't want to do whatever it is you're trying to do, and "it needs more documentation" is a dirt-cheap stopper they can throw at you because in their (correct) experience people tend not to document things. They may not mean it as such a ploy, but it is what it is.
So I go ahead and document things anyhow. I sort of naturally fall into documentation-first development, so I almost always have it.
And what I've found is, this doesn't make people read your documentation. What it does is it makes people stop asking for it. Hence my belief about it being a ploy more than anything else, again, perhaps not consciously, but in effect.
When people do read documentation, I find people do a very surface read of it. You can say "This JSON object has these three parameters, 'age' which must be an int, 'name' which must be a string, and 'status' which must either be a string from one of these three values or be entirely missing", provide them a JSON schema or some other standard format that precisely specifies that and can be automatically used to validate and/or generate code, and you'll get things submitted to your API that more or less have an age, a name, and a status, but sometimes the age will be a string with a number in it, the name attribute will experience various capitalizations of the attribute name (not the value), and they'll push status as an empty string and then complain when your API rejects it. I often find myself a bit agog at my fellow programmers with decades of experience who still seem to be struggling with the concept that I can't write code that takes "stuff" any more than they can and are so careless about interacting with an API or something, and then get pissy when the code fails because of unexpected input.
I'm not angry about this, either... because I've learned to just budget the time for it and 100% expect it as part of the process. I fully expect to be asked for documentation, for them to do a surface read of it, and for us to have to work through the process of actually conforming to the documentation. I will send them references to the docs as we go but I scrupulously avoid even a hint of the idea that they should have already known this because I documented; it is only references to convenient examples I happen to have on hand, or whatever other softening I can apply. And of course, I am not perfect either, and when I do edit the documentation because of something I hadn't considered, I always make a point of calling out that the documentation wasn't quite correct and I've fixed it, so it doesn't look like an accusation. It's just part of the process.
> And what I've found is, this doesn't make people read your documentation. What it does is it makes people stop asking for it. Hence my belief about it being a ploy more than anything else, again, perhaps not consciously, but in effect.
I can't say it always stops people for asking them. Even when they've commented on the documentation when it was shared, even when the conversation started around a link to the documentation, I've found people one month in when it's time for them to do something ask for documentation with the implication there is none, and if you provide it in the meeting where they're trying to prolong the process they just insist they need time to review it despite having had at some stages a month to do so (or having left comments that at least indicate they already did)
“‘There is a game of puzzles,’ he resumed, ‘which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word — the name of town, river, state or empire — any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident.’”
—From “The Purloined Letter” (1845) by Edgar Allen Poe
"If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else’s Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there." - the incomparable Douglas Adams
I recently bought something from a big box electronics store, via their website, to be picked up in-store. I walked right past a large human-sized sign directing customers to go to the outdoor pickup area for mobile pickup orders. I didn't even see it. Kinda shocked me actually. (When I got to the counter, the sales clerk had an exasperated, ive-said-this-100-times-today tone in his voice when they said "pickup is outside").
So, what happened? I was focused on other things. I was trying to not be hit by vehicles while crossing the street. I was trying to aim my body at the doors. I was trying to avoid bumping into other pedestrians. I was trying to prepare my mobile pickup order in the app.
What could have been done differently? You need to get these things right the first time. Once the user is in a mindset where they know where to go, signs to the contrary won't be noticed. The store's app told me to go to the counter, so I went. If the app had initially showed me a message like "Oh, at this location we do things differently, pickup is always outside" I think that would have worked.
The design principle is: You need to get in front of the user's eyes somehow. A brightly-colored banner isn't going to stop a user who's used to tuning out banners. Banners are where websites put ads and beg for donations. If you want a user to see pertinent information, you need to put it EXACTLY where the user will look. Make the page show half of the D&D role playing info, and make them click a button to expand the rest (coincidentally the button says "This is homebrew content, hidden so you notice this, this feature can be disabled with a checkbox at the top of the page")
This reminds me of the first time I used curb-side pickup at a DairyQueen that had opened during the pandemic. I followed the directions in the app, parked at a designated spot with clear signage, marked myself as there, and... nothing.
Finally I went in, and got "oh, we don't do curbside pickup".
I was already paranoid about it, and now I'll be forever.
I think the issue is a little more general than just banner blindness (which typically refers to ignoring banner ads).
The page is chock full of distracting elements that have nothing to do with the content the user is looking for. The only way to read it is to mentally progressively block out the useless stuff. That banner fades easily and is probably one of the first things to go.
Also, they think of the banner as a clear contrasting color, but it's mostly a background image with a graphical, stylized text overlay that blends on to it. It's camouflage really, not prominent at all.
But I don't think graphical design should be a core competency of a good D&D resource center. There's almost some cred in their bafflement about why this doesn't work.
I say put an [Unofficial] badge, with a distinct style and color next to each link and title. It will be on the content the users see.
Yeah, and banner blindness is about more than just things that look like ads. The top and side bars of webpages traditionally contain information about the website as a whole, and are not relevant to the specific page you are viewing. You look there to navigate away from the page you are on, but ignore them when digesting the content you came to read. This would be true even if ads hadn't ruined our expectations, and has analogs in other media. In a book, you don't expect users to read the header/footer (page number, chapter, etc) each time they turn a page. Those are there to navigate through the book more quickly, but are ignored once you get to where you want.
> I think the issue is a little more general than just banner blindness
Beyond banner blindness and also the general page design as you say I think there is another, more subtle problem as well: the user doesn't care about the distinction. "Official" vs "homebrew"? What does that even mean in the context of D&D gaming? Although I'm sure it's possible to fully appreciate the distinction by reading whatever legalese is provided I'm equally sure no one will.
It's hard to make people notice things they don't want to notice. It's even harder when your callout looks like an ad festooning a clutter.
I used to be a part of that site before splitting off to create another dungeons and dragons wiki. The owner of it doesn't want to change anything, hence why we split off.
Followup question: why has this not been changed, this question is three years old and yet the wiki under discussion still has the exact same homebrew banners that blend into the page's frame and have the "hey this is not official D&D content" part way over on the right, away from the natural eye-scanning flow.
There are several slightly different possible solutions, nobody agrees on which solution is best and nobody dares - or cares enough - to actually do something without having the ok from everybody else. Finally the discussion just peters out without anything happening.
It ends with “Aye aye, I certainly won't be implementing anything before passing it by here first.”
In my personal experience all the somewhat successful non-hierarchical communities I’ve been part of, had some principles which make it easy to get stuff done without waiting for an explicit agreement from everybody else. For example the consent-based government system Sociocracy encourages people to ask for objections instead of asking for agreement from the the others.
This was my first question as well. So many great answers given, and three years later absolutely zero change. To be fair, it sometimes takes me a really long time to get around to fixing things, but after so much discussion it's a bit sad to see it never went anywhere. Even just editing the graphic for colors and layout would make it harder to skip over.
My question exactly, especially because blindness to this exact banner accidentally led me to slipping a homebrewed poison that looks like a potion into a D&D campaign and expecting the players to be familiar with it. Only to have them hand it to a sickly NPC. Oops.
Italics is a poor choice for the text, feels like it takes more mental energy to read so it's easier to gloss over.
The color scheme doesn't seem to match the rest of the website, so it's easier to write off as an ad or to just ignore it out of disgust.
The main text on the left, "Homebrew Page", doesn't necessarily register as synonymous with "Unofficial" to me, so even if someone gives it a passing glance they might just assume it's a specific version of D&D and therefore official. I'm not deep in the community though, so most players may already understand what it means.
Yeah “homebrew” is a pretty well-known term within the community to mean non-official.
Interestingly, DandDWiki is somewhat notorious for being less than accurate in many articles, I wonder how much of that reputation is potentially attributable to this phenomenon of mixing up homebrew and official content.
I deal with something similar in a bit of software I use. If I click on an appointment, I can then click on the patient name to see the patient record or the client name to see the client info. At some point someone thought they should make the patient name more prominent, so they put it in a larger font, bold, all caps with extra spacing between the characters, and now I never see it and end up accidentally clicking the client's name.
Since the rest of the site uses the standard MediaWiki theme, I would have expected something that looks similar to the page banners used on Wikipedia (cleanup needed, requested deletion, etc.).
At first I didn't think there was any good reason not to notice their banner, but the more I look at it, it does look a lot like a banner ad. Especially since it goes wider than the text of the page itself.
Note that Wikipedia refers to these as messages[1], not banners, which I feel helps explain the difference in how they're perceived - whereas banners are generally decorative, with contrasting design style, wikipedia message boxes use the same design language as the rest of the article's infoboxes (solid backgrounds, don't span the full content width, thin+dark border with an image or single thick colored side for emphasis)
I have a lot of YouTube videos on as background noise when doing chores. Mostly of the vaguely-informative entertainment variety. These have ubiquitous sponsor messages, usually for the same few companies. (PCBWay sponsors basically every electronics YouTuber out there, and NordVPN & Audible probably sponsor everyone else).
Normally I'd just skip straight past the sponsor message (and YouTube's new 'most replayed' feature enables this pretty effectively, as these videos all have a massive spike where the sponsored message ends), but if I'm doing chores I can't and am actually forced to listen to the ad. I have found that I've tuned in to the subtle changes in tone of voice between "content" and "ad", to the point where I don't even hear the messages any more; they're just a void in my short-term memory.
My bet would be for the background of a violet starred sky, that reminds advertisement for esoteric and new age related products. As view tend to go towards the deeper part of a scene, this moves the eye away from the message.
Unicorn colored Galaxies could work if you are the NASA, probably not so great in other cases.
Put the information you want people to read in the body of the information that they are already reading. No one looks all that gubbins that surrounds the meat of a web page any more than people look at or care about street furniture.
And, anyway what is the real distinction between official and homebrew? Is that like Organic and Homemade in a supermarket? A distinction that is often without a meaningful difference.
Canon vs. custom, I think. The point being that you don't want a random person complaining to their DM that they're not using the rule about magical trousers, when it was actually written by some random on the internet and added to a Wiki.
> And, anyway what is the real distinction between official and homebrew?
Well, official is the material written by the creator of the game (here WotC), which is supposed to be tested, properly edited and more or less balanced; homebrew is written by anyone: that doesn't mean it's lower quality or unbalanced, but there's less of a guarantee; so most GM will usually allow official content and forbid homebrew
Homebrew content in D&D can be ridiculously poorly-balanced compared to officially-published content, which is required to go through at least some internal testing by the game's managers and designers.
One of the comments on an answer complete with a nice redesigned mock goes: This is really good, but I'd drop the word "PAGE" that isn't adding anything and have it just say "HOMEBREW" to focus on the detail that matters.
Should have done a clear banner, with maybe a red or yellow border, and an icon. Preferably inside the content area, just like Wikipedia does on disputed articles or current events.
His banner has stylized fonts, a photo as a background, and as such looks like an ad or something decorative.
Exactly this, the infobox is common to effectively every wiki for purposes exactly like this one. They’re using mediawiki as their engine so they already have the support baked in.
They used to have one on every page, but the creator of the website (for some reason I was never able to figure out) hated how it contained authorship information so he removed it from every page.
My own wiki puts the "this is homebrew" information in said infobox, and has never received a single complaint about people mixing up homebrew and official content.
I've been using ad blockers for so long, sometimes I forget that the web even has ads.
A while ago I sent a friend a link to something I found online, not realizing it was full of porn ads and scam ads. I had to convince him to get off the phone with "Microsoft".
I have been as well, however there are still large sections of pages that almost always contain irrelevant information. I have gotten stuck several times where I'm trying to scan for some piece of information but cannot find it, ultimately to find it's in an area that I literally did not see because I automatically ignore it..
The first thing I saw when I visited the stackexchange link in this post, was a huge banner at the top of the page, which really confused me as it led me to think that this post was a clever and sarcastic meta-joke of some kind.
Because the color contrast of the site makes that banner shrink into the softer background. The sharp color scheme of black with bright pink combined with the font is so garish my eyes divert from it. I also think putting that text off to the far upper right on a page designed for left to right, top to bottom English readers means that text is in no mans land. On a wide screen readers eyes will move to the left and down to navigate.
It feels that your attempt to make the banner "pop" had an opposite effect. You need to completely rethink the design of the banner in terms of color, placement, and text.
I am about 1.85m tall and about 100kg. I don't disappear like a sheet of paper when you see me from the side, and I'm pretty noticeable from the front and back. Often, I'm wearing a bright fluorescent orange waterproof jacket. People walk entirely the fuck into me all the the time. Not even on their phones or anything, and not "glancing-shoulder-bump" but full on walk-straight-into-guy-standing-there.
My daily driver is a big noisy old Range Rover. Okay, dark blue is maybe not the most in-yer-face colour, but it's quite loud and it's easy to tell when you're near it. People walk out in front of me, all the time, or pull out in front of me or hop their bike off the kerb in front of me, all the time.
My occasional work Landrover Defender - I don't often drive it, I've already got a tremendously capable off-roader, but sometimes I need to use the big roof rack or we need two 4x4s for a job - is literally Fire Engine Red, covered in red and yellow high-vis, and has big blue strobes on it (that we normally don't use). People walk out in front of it, pull out in front of it, hop their bikes off the kerb in front of it... did you guess "all the time"? Right, I knew you would!
The more visible you are the harder you are to see. I don't know why.
I have a really hard time with motion--my brain is unable to block it. I've become very frustrated with, for example, news sites that instad of text and still images, have started showing animated clips or short videos. I've tried a firefox extension that is supposed to stop everything, but it doesn't work terribly well. I use "reader view" extensively, but it doesn't always work.
(Incidentally, I have the same issue in real life when I go to a restaurant with a TV, so I intentially sit with my back to the TV.)
It looks like a title header or something, I probably wouldn’t read it either. Too high up and to the right. Needs to be centered and closer to the reading material.
i dont think its really banner blindness, but rather the more general fact that i learned that most sites use these "areas" on the page either for advertisements, or kewl banners, none of which i actually am interested when reading the content of the page.
I never have found any answer to any question in that particiular area. The colors also make me pay even less attention, and if you really wanted me to notice it, it would have been red text :D
Tangentially, I find it funny that the answer to this states banner blindness on a site (and set of sites, i.e., StackExchange) that usually takes nearly half the screen on desktop with a useless banner that everyone just ignores and scrolls through. StackExchange could learn a thing or two about UX from ux.stackexchange.
On topic, most people just don’t read on web pages and emails! They expect to be spoon fed in tweet increments through short messages.
Reading the first parts, I thought "oh, he's just pissed that he has to do something actually smart to get people to notice" like a childish refusal to ignore the obvious.. Nobody has looked at a banner since the late 90s.
It's surprising and interesting that he didn't understand it himself, after reading his own post, it should have clicked.
I have enjoyed D&D wiki before, and I admit that I have also missed the huge banner. Usually, I will read a page, get halfway down to the place where the rules get crazy, and then scroll up to the top to check if it's a homebrew. The banner is completely invisible!
"Under the Radar" by J. Bond & R. Kirshenbaum was a good one on this topic – summary: people develop protective "radar" for ads and it explores ideas how to communicate effectively while taking it under account.
A lot of people are saying it's because it looks like an ad, and I agree, but my first thought was that it just looked like an ugly banner with the page title or something.
Maybe I've been conditioned by poorly designed webpages.
It’s very easy. Some people don’t know English so we’ll or internet slang to understand what homebrew pages are all about :) no offense to these ppl, just the site audience is perhaps really diverse.
Typically elements that don't match the page theme are advertisements, and unless it was pointed out in this article, my brain would probably filter it out as noise believing it to be an ad.
The banner is positioned where the navbar is usually found on most websites. That's an area people tend to ignore unless they actually need to, you know, navigate.
I think it is because it looks too much like an Ad. It is so different than the surrounding content that I assume it is not part of the pages design and thus ignore it.
This is a variant of an XY Problem. The original question was, to paraphrase, why the website sucks. One answer given was that the site (a game wiki) had too much unofficial content compared to official content. Now the question becomes why an official/unofficial annotation on each page isn't working.
I don't play the game, and until today I have never visited the site. But I doubt that the solution being discussed will have any material effect on the original problem.
I do the same thing with email. When people put a short sentence or something at the bottom of an email I often ignore it because it looks like a signature.
That was, of course, until they banned psychic violence in the "Goddamn, get out of my brain" amendment in the late 21st century.