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Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

My brain has re-wired itself to completely ignore advertising. Never occurred to me to donate until I read this post, because I just flatly ignore ads, even from nonprofits.

Just an observation about myself that might perhaps hold true for others.

Or maybe I'm just abnormal.

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I see the banner and it annoys me. I'm much more likely to respond to this sensible third party encouraging me to give money to wikipedia than I am to listen to "A Personal Appeal From Jimmy Wales, Founder Of Wikipedia" begging me personally for money.

There's a close button next to any of them that you see. It'll get rid of it for good if it annoys you that much (or if you already donated...)

The close button is way too small, and difficult to use from a tablet.

It's called "Banner Blindness". We probably all have it.

Pretty hard to ignore their ads (very large and intrusive).

I think it might also have to do with the mental conditioning of Wikipedia, which is to say, you're not used to seeing ads on there, so the 'Appeal' is all the more apparent.

If that ad were on TechCrunch, I'd never have noticed it, but on the otherwise stark canvas of Wikipedia, it's all I can do to disregard it.

I haven't looked at the page code but it seems like there's a deliberate delay after the page loads and you start reading before the banner pops in right in your field of vision. It drives me crazy every time.

> "My brain has re-wired itself to completely ignore advertising."

This post is an advert :/ You didn't ignore it... Perhaps we have different definitions of 'advert'.

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