Fracking eyeballs at the turn of the 20th century | Hacker News Reader

Fracking eyeballs at the turn of the 20th century

asteriskmag.com

94 pointssamclemens17 comments

Many wonderful paragraphs here, but to pull out perhaps a crux:

> If you were advertising a car, was it better to show a picture of a car, or of a pretty woman? If one was selling shirt collars, was it better to do so under the headline “Murder!” or the headline “Quality Shirt Collars”? To make a long story short (and to skip over the proto-pataphysical techniques by which Nixon established what we might call a “science of irrelevancy”), Nixon found that “irrelevant illustrations do attract more attention and hold interest longer than do relevant ones.” 8 Which is to say: systematically doing violence to sense raised revenue. This could be proven in his laboratory. Would it be wrong to say that we live, in many respects, in the world evolved from that finding?

Maybe that's why there's a trend in mobile games ads in which the ad shows a gameplay that has nothing to do with the actual game.

For instance: https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/co8m3b/garde...

This is weirdly common on Twitter right now. Most of the ads seem to be mobile games and the actual video content never has anything to do with the game. The same game will be advertised with a huge range of random CGI videos.

There are repeated ads on my (Android) phone touting free solar installation in my state, apparently done by or for women with tight sweaters and large breasts.

I guess the ad worked on me. :-/

Thanks for sharing this. I have seen these ads numerous times, but I wasn’t aware that the actual gameplay was different. What a weird advertising tactic for a game.

That tells you what works short-term, but fails at telling you happens after people acclimate. Look at web ads: at first they grabbed attention, but now everyone ignores them out of habit which imo is a net negative.

> but now everyone ignores them out of habit which imo is a net negative

People ignoring ads is a net positive for the world. Unfortunately, enough people still pay attention to them to make them economically viable.

I recommend trying to actively watch just about any ad out there and trying to find one that doesn't show or sell you the idea of something unrelated to that product. They are rare.

For example: most ads for prescription medicine these days try to show you folks or cartoons of people doing irrelevant activities. They do that because it makes folks feel a lot more positive than actually talking about the drugs.

I had bigPharma ads as much as the next person, but "irrelevant" might be a bit too harsh. For some of the things being targeted, just the implication that the prescription will allow you to do said irrelevant activities would be a huge selling point.

Being immune to pathological psyops is not a "net negative" unless you are the person benefiting from people's lack of immunity.

Edit: By “net negative” I’m speaking in context of the post and therefore to the perspective of the advertiser.

The author is affiliated with the Friends of Attention, a very thoughtful and interesting collective of artists, academics, and others who are dedicated to helping reclaim our attention from its relentless “slicing, dicing, and pricing” by the Internet and media economy.

They have a terrific trove of artifacts and guides on their website:

https://friendsofattention.net/attention_trove

Figure 4 is absolutely fantastic.

I'm getting real Adam Curtis vibes from this piece.

Holly carp! I just realized I was subconsciously reading in his voice - specifically when thinking about eye movements.

The two documentaries to watch back to back are Human Resources and Century of Self.

Utterly depressing truth about the source of PR.

Great article.

I wonder if one could wear uniform and seemingly opaque contacts which would prevent determining exact eye position/gaze?

Or go the other direction and use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage (since modern techniques won't use reflections/shape as much as image-recognition, probably?)

Maybe colour lenses that have different colours and "stretch" out random lengths in different directions. Colour to confound determining what the pupil is and random stretches to make it harder to determine where to eye is looking.

Aviators are more readily available.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com