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Banner blindness
- reidjs 3y agoThat article will be very meta next time Jimmy Wales' face is plastered over the page asking for wikipedia donations.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
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- andai 3y agoThat might be why his face is there. Surely that counteracts banner blindness (at least partially)?
- karaterobot 3y ago> A higher than expected number of advertisements may cause a user to view the page as cluttered.[7] The number of adverts and annoyances on a webpage contribute to this perception of clutter.[6] As users can concentrate on only one stimulus at a time, having too many objects in their field of vision causes them to lose focus.[8] This contributes to behaviors such as ad avoidance or banner blindness. I have done a pretty good job filtering out advertisements and other annoying web crap, and if anything ever sneaks through I notice it immediately. Whatever the opposite of banner blindness is, that's what I exhibit. Banner hypersensitivity?
- CoffeeTails 3y agoSame here. Some pages are, for me, unusable without blocking all ads and banners. Especially if they move or have bright colors!
- dhosek 3y agoSometimes banner blindness becomes total blindness: https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kop4ci75632g https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kop4ci756...
- malfist 3y agoI don't get how companies, who's only product is content, get their content to be so....distastefully full of ads.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoThe content is not the product just like how the chum a fisherman tosses is not the product. The product is the customer base and they make money selling access to it for advertising.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago> I don't get how companies Then let's philosophize at length about it. I'm about to write a borderline religious text on the matter. > who's only product is content This is the reason why you could not understand. The content is not the product. It's actually you personally. You are the product. Your attention, your memory, your cognitive functions, your behavior. They forcibly take those from you without your consent, without warning. Then they sell it off to the highest bidder. That is their product, their business model, the way they make money. Industrial scale violation of people's minds. Industrial scale mind rape. Content? It's just bait designed to attract you. The content is completely irrelevant to them. Just a means to an end. Only reason there's any content at all is you wouldn't visit the website otherwise. To them content is nothing but a cost they'd very much enjoy not having to pay. A cost center that they're only too happily outsourcing to generative AI. Even the word "content" is a problem. It's industry jargon but I view it as something of an euphemism. This so called "content" is nothing but a generic replaceable square around which the ads agglutinate like parasites. The web today is mostly garbage because of all this industrial scale "content" being produced. Nobody has anything real to say, it's just "content" they produce by the truckloads in order to attract people to sites so they can sell out their audience's minds to the corporations. There ought to be a better name for it. "Slop" comes to mind. Yeah, slop sounds good. All this slop isn't real human creation, it's just an undesirable industrial byproduct of the modern web. People create slop in order to attract audiences so they can sell them out to the advertisers. When you see HN users complaining about how shitty the Google search results are, they're complaining about the ever increasing density of worthless slop they're running into when they search for literally anything. People are actually paying for search engines whose entire business model is filtering out the slop and presenting to their users the sites which are actually worth visiting. Hell, this is why people come to HN to begin with. There's a refreshingly small amount of slop on this site. On HN you find real people writing real thoughts. People who work at billion dollar companies, people who created programming languages and operating systems that others use, people who thought up the algorithms you learn about in books, a disproportionate number of them come here in order to comment on things. Sometimes they tell incredible stories. Those comments are more valuable than the articles being commented on. This is what slop isn't: real human culture. Maybe the advertisers just haven't found out about HN yet. Not too long ago, there was a story here about Google bumping HN up in search results. That bit of news actually made me scared for the future. What's more sinister though is the fact advertisers have literal censorship power over the web. You'll never see a text such as this comment posted on an ad-supported website. The fact is if it offends the advertisers it doesn't get published at all. Because if you publish it, they cut you off from your advertising money. Therefore the advertisers own the creators and control their creative processes. I've seen such cutoffs happen, it's downright pathetic. Watching good people bend down to the likes of Google because someone with money was offended at their brand being associated with something they didn't like even though they literally paid for it. I watched people scramble to unpublish, to delete, to destroy their own creations just to appease the almighty advertisers. It seriously made me sick. > distastefully full of ads It's made to be that way. It's carefully tuned via unethical human experimentation ("A/B testing") to make it as profitable as possible but just tolerable enough that you won't leave or do something about it. They employ talented programmers to design algorithms to automatically figure out your limits and push you right up to those limits. Use uBlock Origin. It's essentially legitimate self-defense at this point. Self-defense for our minds. Don't try to pay them off, that just proves you have disposable income to spend on products you don't need, driving up the value of your attention even further. You're essentially paying for the privilege of segmenting yourself into the upper echelons of their markets. At some point, some shareholder value maximizing CEO will come along, notice the vast piles of money being left on the table and then promptly sell out the audience so as to avoid leaving money on the table. Betrayal is virtually guaranteed. Don't empathize with them. Just laugh when they call you entitled, when they call you a thief. Nobody in this world is more entitled than an advertiser. They think they are entitled to your attention. They think they can sell your attention to corporations. The mere fact they even think your attention is theirs to sell to begin with just invalidates anything they could possibly say in their defense. You'll watch them defend nonsense such as "intellectual property" even though they constantly violate your right to privacy by collecting vast amounts of personal information about you, information that really ought to belong to you by all reasonable standards. Just use uBlock Origin. Delete their noise without a second thought. On sight. Don't lose a second of sleep over it. Don't feel an ounce of guilt. Ads are nothing but noise. To be filtered.
- thih9 3y agoWhat do you use? Does this approach work both on desktop or mobile?
- YoshiRulz 3y agouBlock Origin has been available on Android Firefox for years.
- dpig_ 3y agoI'm the same. Especially when the banners are animating in full-colour next to static text I'm trying to focus on.
- saghm 3y agoI feel like a similar thing happens in "real life" sometimes, not just on websites. Back in high school, I used to volunteer at an animal shelter, and we had an area out back where we'd walk the dogs or let them run around in one of a few fenced in areas throughout the day so they could go to the bathroom and get some exercise. The door leading out here was located in one of the rooms with dog kennels, so people coming to potentially adopt a dog would walk through this room a lot, and often they'd try to walk out back and watch or participate with the volunteers and staff taking some of the dogs out. We'd ask them politely to go back inside because they aren't allowed out there and point out the very large sign in large font on the door saying this, and every time they'd always act very surprised because they claimed not to have seen it. I'm sure some people were just feigning ignorance because it seemed easier, but the sheer number of people claiming it makes it believable that at least _some_ of them genuinely didn't notice; they saw a door, they wanted to go through, and they opened it without processing the words right in front of their face.
- bagels 3y agoThere are so many signs that everyone encounters everyday that are of no consequence. Everyone develops the habit of not reading them.
- pixl97 3y agoAdblock for the brain. This is the problem with advertisements. The vie so hard for your attention they really are hard to ignore. But after they catch your attention you've realized that your attention has just been wasted. Soon you catch yourself just filtering out anything that could potentially be an ad.
- breischl 3y agoDefinitely a thing. Just yesterday I was annoyed by my auto mechanic's credit card fee, and said they should've told me up front. She pointed out it was on a sign on the counter that I was looking at that moment, and had also been there when I dropped the car off the day before.
- D-Coder 3y ago
- paganel 3y agoI’m exactly like that, this is why I can browse the web with no ad-blocker installed with almost no issue, by default I just ignore all banners. Curiously enough the same thing does not happen when watching regular TV programs. I’ve stopped watching regular TV almost 4 years ago, and that’s why when I happen to visit some of my friends who have the TV on I’m always surprised whenever ads interrupt whatever is being shown, I can’t understand how come people can put up with that. I guess they formed “TV ad blindness”
- andai 3y agoI think the difference is that you can't ignore an ad when it comes on, because the thing you were watching goes away. Whereas even on the worst websites you can just scroll or click the X and get back to what you were doing.
- drexlspivey 3y agoMy favorite example of this https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/120541/why-do-people-not-notice-our-enormous-prominent-clear-and-contrasting-purple-b https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/120541/why-do-people-...
- ot 3y agoSurprised that neither the article or this thread link to https://xkcd.com/570/ https://xkcd.com/570/
- bibliotekka 3y ago> Title text: Somewhere out there is a company that has actually figured out how to enlarge penises, and it's helpless to reach potential customers.
- kaycebasques 3y agoThis can be a GOTCHA in docs site UX. A lot of docs sites use admonitions (e.g. [1]) to call special attention to a particular piece of info and, ironically, the admonition might make readers less likely to see the info. [1] https://docusaurus.io/docs/markdown-features/admonitions https://docusaurus.io/docs/markdown-features/admonitions
- hinkley 3y agoI ran into this about 8 years ago. I was using a new dev tool, and the docs said there was a UI element to do something. I looked, and looked and just could find what they were talking about. So I contacted them to ask what the deal was, and they sent me a screen grab. Turns out what I was looking for was in a weird rectangle embedded halfway down the page and centered on the 3rd quartile of the width of the page. Exactly where someone would stick an ad into an HTML page. They had put a box around it and styled it a little differently, so my brain tuned it right out.
- quercusa 3y agoProp 65 has entered the chat...
- user- 3y agoThey should include a blurb about Wikipedia's donation requests
- eastbound 3y agoWikipedia has had a banner for 20 of the last 20 years, claiming not to be able to pay hosting and management bills, while hosting and management represent about 1% of their global finances, while they have various endeavours like hiring paid rewriters to rewrite Wikipedia in various political ways.
- bdcravens 3y agoI wish the image in the article was a screenshot of Wikipedia begging for donations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fundraising_banner.jpeg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fundraising_banner.jpeg
- permo-w 3y agowhy wish? make it so
- whamlastxmas 3y agoTo be fair the existing image is a really good example
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- omoikane 3y ago> Users dislike animated ads This section cites a few sources from ~10 years ago, but we still see those annoying video ads pop up in random places in 2024. I wonder if those ads were actually bought by competing companies with the intent to bring negative attitudes toward whatever is being advertised.
- rhdunn 3y agoAs a personal anectote, I find anything that moves in my periferal vision to be distracting. Therefore, if there are any animations that occur without me initiating them on a second monitor, I find those distracting. That includes animated gifs, videos, ads, etc. on pages I have open as reference material. They need a way of pausing, stopping, or hiding the animation if it lasts more than 5 seconds to comply with accessibility guidelines [1]. [1] https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/pause-stop-hide.html https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/pause-stop-hide....
- data-ottawa 3y agoI think people try to tap the 1mm X to close the ad and accidentally engage with it boosting the metric. Or the videos that scroll with you appear to have 100% impressions.
- pflenker 3y agoI once was a product manager for an app which included an inbox (mostly for promotional stuff). That app also included banner ads here and there. Consistent feedback from our users was that they missed that there was a new unread item in said inbox. About half a year after I started managing that product I decided to fix this, seemed like an easy win. The inbox was a bit hidden, so a red dot on its icon wasn’t going to cut it - so I sat down with one of the devs to brainstorm for a quick solution. „What do you mean“, he said. „It’s already there!“ And he pointed at something at the front page of the app. And sure enough: it was an area highlighted in yellow, saying something along the lines of „you have x items in your inbox“. I swear I have not seen it before. It didn’t even look like an ad, but it used similar attention-grabbing mechanisms as an ad, which was probably why everyone filtered it out. Turned out it was a manager decision: partners had complained that people missed out on their valuable promos in the inbox, and the boss decided a big box right at the front and center of the app would fix it. He then sent screenshots to partners and their complaints stopped. Ironically we never fully fixed this, as the boss thought that it was already prominent enough and feared that changing it would mean partners would complain again.
- euroderf 3y agoReading the daily (paper!) newspaper as a kid, I trained my brain to skip large ads entirely. Only rarely did I have a double-take. The same skills have transfered to digital media. Banner ads and sidebar ads simply do not exist. Unfortunately... pop-up ads defeat this.