It's an assault on the mind.

What's freaky is there are people who actually like the ads.

Granted, many of us enjoy the kooky ads that occur during the Super Bowl. That's not really what I'm talking about. I've met people who say they enjoy midroll ads in videos and podcasts. There are even folks who like banner ads. To me, those all represent precious seconds that add up to countless hours of my life wasted, which I will never get back. The more ads I avoid, the more opportunity to experience life I have.

Another horrible thing about ads in general is they distract one from being alone with their own thoughts. A lot of people are too afraid to spend time alone with their own thoughts, so in a sense they might enjoy the fact that any sensory input can take them away from that. To me, modern ads are thought vampires. It might be one thing if ads focused on the merits of products, and if most products today were of quality and a fair price, except that is not the norm.

Who are these people that like ads? I'm so curious. What do they like about midrolls or popups or banners???

I loathe online ads in general because they're the bottom of the barrel, designed to be inconvenient.

But I enjoy creative ads thanks to growing up watching the french tv show Culture Pub: https://www.culturepub.fr/annee-chapitre/2007/

For example, insight into the french advertisement culture makes you appreciate the full depth of the movie "99 francs": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0875113/

Imagine a person who's IQ is a dozen or so points to the left of the curve, those folks like a lot of really really dumb repetitive stuff. I worked with one of these folks in an overnight shift, he had seniority having worked there for many years. He listened to the same comedy show every single shift and laughed at the same jokes at the same spots every single time. I attempted to put on some other comedy thing once, he got pretty angry and demanded that we put on "his" show. Thankfully I was only on with him twice a week, but still I felt like I was going insane.

This is a very uncharitable take IMO that veers into (I’m assuming unintentional) snobbery. Some people just have a routine or whatever that helps them get through the workday. My taste gets a lot simpler when I’m at work for sure. I really enjoy putting on shows I’ve already watched a dozen times, regardless of quality.

Dumb people also exist. It's okay for a person to be dumb. Thats just how it is sometimes.

The HN crowd tends to filter out lower IQ people from their social circles so that it's easy to forget this simple fact about humanity.

Sometimes? Look at IQ distribution, by definition half of folks have it lower. Now I wouldn't use the term 'dumb' if you want any sort of dialog, its not kind (like the opposite would be smart arsehole or similar), ie 'lower intelligence' is derogatory enough.

One thing I've realized - I simply can't grok many of theirs' decisions, viewpoints, values. And just pure facts rarely pierce the thick veil or version of reality they create for themselves to feel comfortable in this crazy world. Or maybe thats the thing - I don't mind feeling uncomfortable in this world, seeing uncomfortable truths, picking up lesser of evils instead if simple black & white polarity, or the pinnacle - actually changing my opinion on things as I learn more about it.

Or in other words - can't talk to them about anything deeper, nor do I grok them beyond surface layer. But as you say its fine, and also its quite easy to create a life where you just don't meet them, apart from odd situations like car repairs or home reconstruction.

You hear variations of this "by definition half are dumber" thing all the time on HN and I'm always curious what the people saying it think it means. It's tautologically true that in some sense a centrality statistic draws a line dividing a group in half. But so what? "Dumb" relative to what? Like, just not "competitively" smart? In what situations does that actually matter? Can you finish the thought?

This sounds more like autism or other neurodivergent thing than unintelligence. I also have a preferred working soundtrack and get pretty annoyed if someone decides to switch it up on me when I'm working! In fact isn't unintelligence fundamentally the inability to pattern recognize well or easily? That he has a "his" show would counter against it...

I must be dumber than I thought since I too sometimes enjoy repeating the same routine when engaged in repetitive drudgery.

I’ve watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail countless times and I laugh at it every time.

Sometimes things get funnier the more you see them too!

I don't think people like the intrusion. I will say I do like very targeted ads that actually show me the solution to a problem or something fun I'd enjoy. I just don't want them covering the entire internet with garbage, which is the state we're in right now.

Sometimes it's hard to believe how different people perceive things.

I'll never forget the last time I visited the Dell website, it had some popup dialogue constantly jump into view on the side and then disappear again after two seconds or so. It was so infuriatingly distracting to me, meanwhile someone else sitting next to me didn't even notice it before I pointed it out. Which I guess explains why that same person often has trouble finding a seemingly obvious button on screen - it could jump across the screen and some might still not see it.

"Why do people not notice our enormous, prominent and contrasting purple banner?"

https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/120541/why-do-people-...

I find it especially funny that when I point my eyes directly at the banner (because it's the subject of the question) my brain still filters it out by ignoring it.

Just check the thread in this post like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50378942#50382558

Ads are usually their own vibe and information.

This is especially true when you know how to avoid ads otherwise and are confronted with what must be the default ads for the majority of regular users.

It's like a smell. Some are pleasant, some are fascinating, and some are totally nasty, but I don't willingly plug my nose everywhere I go like a psycho.

What would the world be like without smells? This is a serious question I'm asking. How recalcitrant do you really have to be to get offended by all ads and on the principle of the matter?

I wouldn't pin them into a particular demographic. I have simply met people over the years who actually see ads as a form of entertainment, almost like pre-entertainment before the real entertainment. If someone isn't adept at recognizing the patterns of manipulation baked into advertising (something I've always been far too aware of), it makes sense they could like ads. After all, ads aren't intended to make the viewer want to turn them off, even if they have that effect on many people anyway.

One of my best friends had banner ads and YouTube ads on his laptop, and there was a day where I finally had to say something about this. I asked him if he ever considered installing an ad blocker and explained how easy it is. He surprised me by saying "Meh, they don't really bother me. I kinda like some of them." As mind-bending as this is from my own perspective, this mindset does seem to exist.

I can also count with more than one finger how many girls I've gone on a movie date with who said "I dunno, I like it" after I made fun of the stupid Coca-Cola commercial or whatever before the trailers. Looking back at this, I probably was being a bit pompous. I'm pretty sure they liked the commercials for the vibes they picked up from their perceived positivity.

I don't know if I would say people inherently like ADs, but are perhaps conditioned to expect ADs and makes it feel normal.

I stopped having cable television in 2001 because I lived in a place where it wasn't available. I moved to a new place in 2002 and went completely pirate media (shitty quality episodes of the Simpsons and such). I went to streaming when that became available, but the point is that I stopped seeing television ads a long time ago.

I remember visiting family during the height of the iPod and being offended by how many iPod ads were on TV. I worked for Apple at the time. I couldn't imagine not hating the company if I didn't work for them because of how intrusive the ads were. My family didn't seem to notice / tuned them out.

I still change the radio station when that song by Jet comes on because I heard it so much in the iPod ads.

Similarly, it's eye opening to see the "default" YouTube experience. Conspiracy, manosphere, AI-generated "deep dive" videos: just complete dreck.

The BBC website? Arent the BBC like the only media company that dont advertise?

BBC good food has tons of tracking. Then I found out they don't belong to BBC anymore.

This is true for a few of these “BBC” sites; they were spun out (and merged) into a company called Immediate Media.

Care to name a few others? Genuinely interested.

Anything that was a BBC magazine got spun off, so that includes Top Gear (the magazine), Good Food, and Gardeners World (and Radio Times, although that didn't officially have "BBC" as part of its name afaik).

Good Food no longer has any mention of the BBC anywhere except in the domain name. I dont think its fair to call it BBC Good Food any more.

BBC doesn’t show ads in the UK (bbc.co.uk), but the international edition (bbc.com) does. The site looks quite different, and automatically redirects based on geolocation.

(Annoyingly it’s also stored in a cookie; if you travel frequently, you can get stuck in a redirect loop.)

I did not know that. I have just checked and my UK ISP provided DNS does not even resolve bbc.com!

I haven’t used an ad blocker in years, and, I don’t know, my brain just sort of learnt to ignore ads. Not “promoted” stuff that looks like regular items in the feeds (e.g. Google ads in search results). But just random banners on the website - I don’t even register them consciously. Every now and then I do notice curiosities like “the meatbag bought a mattress let’s offer him 100 other mattresses”, but otherwise I feel like I am totally blind to ad banners.

I leave my adblocker off for YouTube because I want the small channels I watch to get money.

I'm so glad that political season is finally over because I've been being spammed by politicians over and over and over. The worst part was they weren't even from my state.

Advertisers forgot that you shouldn't spam the exact same ad over and over. I am never going to buy insurance from gigco, state form, or liderty for that reason.

Sometimes there is a glitch and I get more generic ads, and I live on the edge of a "rich" zip code so I get ads for jet rideshares and lately ULA, I mean I enjoy Scott Manley's Deep Space Updates but I am not launching sats, so I am not sure why I get those ads.

When you eventually need insurance who will you buy it from? One of those companies that you know are insurance companies has a better chance of getting it than some little unknown company. Nobody is immune to propaganda.

Not sure why I still have the Google app on my phone, used to like their live score system, until from the 3 teams I said I follow they started showing me on the lockscreen scores from teams and championships that I never in my life followed anywhere. So, the Google app sometimes sucks me in with various articles, and of course when you click on them, you'ren ot in safari with an ad blocker, but the pure google experience, and somehow I get the feeling that almost all websites out there are impossible to use or to get any information from, as they are 90% ads. You get overlays, audo playing videos, more overlays, more banners, it's impossible to use any website that is a bit popular without any adblocker.