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My favorite most annoying ad tactic is the trick slowing down progress bar. It starts off fast making it seem like it’s going to be, say, a ten-second ad so you
by DrewADesign 10mo ago
My favorite most annoying ad tactic is the trick slowing down progress bar. It starts off fast making it seem like it’s going to be, say, a ten-second ad so you decide to suffer through it… but progressively slows so you notice at like the 20 second mark you’re only 2/3 of the way through the progress bar, so probably less than halfway done. Murderous rage.
- xoxxala 10mo agoMr. Beast on youtube is guilty of that. Matt Parker of Standup Maths fame did an in-depth look at how that works. Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc0OU1yJD-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc0OU1yJD-c
- drcongo 10mo agoNot the only thing he's guilty of.
- red-iron-pine 10mo agoexplain
- drcongo 10mo agoIt's all a scam.
- x187463 10mo agoA fantastic video from Matt, as usual. Yet another data point on why nobody should be wasting a second watching Mr Beast content. Complete algorithmically optimized garbage. I recall Mr Beast showing up in a Colin Furze video for a few minutes and Mr Beast was very clearly incapable of being a normal person. He was obviously out of place, being in full makeup and styled, and couldn't seem to be bothered to actually engage or express real interest in the subject. I think the guy has replaced his real persona with some manifestation of the YouTube algorithm. If he's not actively making money, he's just a shell.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- m4tthumphrey 10mo agoThat Colin Furze cameo was so weird.
- x187463 10mo agoFrom what I can tell, based on an excerpt of an interview with Colin, Mr Beast had a bunker-related video and visited Colin's bunker. As a viewer of Colin's channel and not Mr Beast, it seemed very strange, but makes more sense if there was a more substantial collaboration taking place in a different video stream.
- duped 10mo agoThey somehow got him doing a cameo on this upcoming Survivor season and it's going to be terrible.
- climb_stealth 10mo agoLuckily the recommendation system does work to some extent. I'm glad I don't get to see any of that stuff on my youtube. Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking. It's scary imagining people getting sucked into that :/
- physicles 10mo agoIf you turn off you watch history in account settings, then youtube.com is just a passive-aggressive black screen telling you to turn it back on. It’s beautiful. When you click over to subscriptions, you see only the stuff that you subscribed to, and nothing else. Recommendations on a video are based on you subscriptions and the current video, and nothing else. I could never go back.
- mc3301 10mo agoFully agreed. The day youtube disables the "turn watch history off," is the day I'll stop using youtube. I, too, could never go back.
- cons0le 10mo agoMrBeast is a hack, but its worth pointing out that all "progress bars" are bad design. You could make the same complaint against most of the progress bars in MsDOS. There was never a consistency in timing so you can never really use them to gauge how much time is left.
- Vegenoid 10mo agoWe’re not talking about a measure of computational progress here. We’re talking about visually representing how much time has elapsed out of a fixed duration. This is exactly where progress indicators shine, the total time for the thing to happen is perfectly specified in advance.
- dspillett 10mo agoThe difference between a lot of OS/app progress bars for IO (and sometimes CPU) operations and these timers, is that the total length of time for a lot of IO operations is often unknown with any accuracy so you have to use a heuristic to guess the current % done. For instance: when reading/writing/both many files of differing sizes on traditional drives there is an amount of latency per file which is significant and not always predictable. Whether you base progress on total size or number of files or some more complicated calc based on both, it will be inaccurate in most cases, sometimes badly so. Even when copying a single large file on a shared drive, or just on a dedicated system with multiple tasks running, the progress is inherently a bit random, the same for any network transfer. Worse are many database requests: you don't get any progress often because there is no progress output until the query processing is complete, and the last byte of the result might arrive in the same fraction of a second the first does¹. The same for network requests, though IE (at least as early as v3) and early versions of Edge did outright lie² there to try make themselves look faster than the competition. The progress bars in videos are a different beast (ahem): the total time is absolutely known, any inaccuracy is either a deliberate lie or gross incompetence. -------- [1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner). [2] It would creep up, getting as far as 80%, before the first byte of response is received. This also confused users who thought that something was actually happening when the action was in fact stalled and just going to time-out.
- kube-system 10mo ago> Whoever came up with that type of progress bar must hate people in general. My first thought is that the person has a strong grasp of their profession and they love money. A hack like that has to have a really high value/effort ratio.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ghostbrainalpha 10mo agoI was forced to do this as a developer of Flash websites in the early 00's. I loved making custom progress bars really fun so people didn't mind watching the huge sites download. I HATED when they had me mess with the time so that it got to 90% really fast and then spent AGES finishing the last 10%.
- transcriptase 10mo agoIf you watch him on Joe Rogan’s podcast he gives a full overview of how every single tiny detail down to colors, length of scene cuts, facial expressions, language, total length of videos, time of day for release, thumbnails, sound effects, music is extensively A/B tested to not only optimize for the algorithm but for hijacking people’s attention as well. That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing aren’t by accident. Everything is intentional because he obsessively tests anything that might give him even the slightest edge in a sea of videos. The content itself barely matters.
- Tanoc 10mo agoThis seems like innately hostile behaviour. Not to other video creators, but to his audience. Stripping as much as he can using data and mathematics is the kind of thing engineers do to pull more out of a machine, not something you do when you're creating informal communications to other humans.
- aembleton 10mo agoWith enough humans, it starts to look like a machine
- orbital-decay 10mo agoAttention engineering is how the charts are topped. Media producers knew this decades before the social media, and perfected it by the late 90's. Avoiding extremely popular stuff is just common sense if you want any real authenticity.
- DrewADesign 10mo agoOh, but then you’re the much-maligned hipster.
- djtango 10mo agoI introduced myself to my now wife as an accidental hipster: - I brewed my own kombucha (I have GI issues and I am so lactose intolerant that even kefir and yoghurt would give me a reaction) - I ride a bicycle everywhere (I exercise daily and like to stay active, bicycle is often the fastest way around London) - I buy expensive locally farmed produce (the quality is usually night and day vs other sources) There were plenty of other signals by which I superficially seem like a hipster but my wife would attest I'm the opposite of an actual one. In the words of my ever wise mother "keep the good bits, leave the rest"
- oneeyedpigeon 10mo agoThere's also the tactic of having different ad behaviours during the same video. The first will be a 30s unskippable ad, the second will be a single skippable one, the third will be 3 ads, one of which you can skip, etc. It's ok on a mobile or if you're at your desk, but if you're watching from a distance it gets really annoying...
- qwertox 10mo agoKind of like a genius idea. Though there should be a special place in hell for app owners who want this in their app.
- Groxx 10mo agoI'm fond of the ones with a fake close button, so tapping it just launches the ad's site. Instant uninstall and 1-star. (Yes, I know it's mostly the ad's fault, but there's no practical way to punish them directly. So force apps to pick better-behaving networks.)
- immibis 10mo agoIME it's a real close button but the ad opens the thing when it closes, regardless of how it closes.
- jordwest 10mo agoA common trick is that the first click on the X will go to the ad, but if you return and click the X again it will close, gaslighting you into thinking you just misclicked the first time. Another trick that I’ve noticed on the Reddit app is that the tappable area is much larger for ads than normal posts. If you tap even near the ad it will visit the ad
- DrewADesign 10mo agoAlso making the hit area smaller than the close graphic itself is a popular one.
- Groxx 10mo agoNo, I mean there are ads with a "close button" in the corner, and then a few seconds later the real close button will appear and it'll weirdly overlap it. Because the first one was fake, just part of the image asset of the ad. They're very very clearly click-fraud tricks, and most platforms will ban them if they're caught. But by clicking on the ad, it closes the ad, and there's no way to go back and report them, nor incentive for ad-viewers to do so. By design, IMO. The whole industry runs on scams like this, there's no incentive for large platforms to proactively block any of them because they lead to money moving through them, where they can extract their rent. They only move against the most egregious, to keep fraud at the same barely-acceptable level as all the others.
- mrbonner 10mo agoYou mean like this: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fs.mltshp.com%2Fr%2F1PAUF%3Fwidth%3D539&f=1&ipt=0e2f42d4fa613209964b08e1f78e568fd839287e0e56e5d5ea306c9f7fda0958 https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
- wumms 10mo agoReminds me of Setup.exe
- btown 10mo agoAs a full mea culpa, I once implemented this years ago for an open-source project (non-ad-related) that could have an unpredictable number of steps with unpredictable timing. We went with an algorithm that would add a % of the remaining progress on each status tick, so, while it would inevitably decelerate, at least users would know that the processing wasn't just frozen. It was a compromise that let us focus our limited attention on the things our project could uniquely do, without needing to refactor or do fast-and-slow-passes to provide subtask-count estimates to the UI. I'd make those same choices again, in that context. But in an ad context, it's inexcusable.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoI've done something similar with a progress bar back in the early days. The task needed to do 10 things, so when each one completed the bar would move 10%. So the bar indicated completion in terms of things that needed to be done but not really in terms of time. It was quick and dirty and we had higher priorities but someone insisted on a "progress bar" so that was the easiest thing.
- layer8 10mo agoThat’s perfectly acceptable, in particular if you also display “step x of 10”, so the user knows the bar doesn’t indicate time.
- layer8 10mo agoIf the only purpose is to show progress and you don’t known the total number of steps in advance, it’s better to show information about the current step and/or substep. Otherwise when your processing actually freezes, the UI would still happily show an advancing progress bar. That’s worse than even just showing a spinner animation or similar.
- btown 10mo agoIf it froze and ceased emitting ticks, it wouldn't advance any more - but the larger point is well taken!
- hiccuphippo 10mo agoThe Windows file copying progress bar prepared me for that one. I don't trust progress bars anymore.
- andrepd 10mo agoUber (and many other apps probably) do a similar thing. A completely deceptive progress bar that's basically an animation that's AB tested for lowest perceived wait, rather than being an actual progress bar in any sense of the word! Everything is trying to scam you nowadays jfc
- laurieg 10mo agoThe positive version of this is clocks in escape rooms. You set the countdown timer to be slightly faster for the first 45 minutes and slightly slower for the last 10, so that people get more of a taste of time pressure towards the end and a higher chance of a "photo finish" which makes for a great fun story.