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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea what ads they serve me because I have ad blindness. My brain just refuses to perceive them.

Even when they float over the text I am trying to read, I do not see them.

Every person says this, but it's a massive industry for a reason. It's the same as with The North Face logo on jackets. You're never paying attention and you don't recall any specific person wearing the jacket. But somehow, when it's time to buy a jacket, you know about the brand, and know all the people in your socioeconomic circle seem to like it.

Some online ads want to grab your attention, but most are just about building almost-subliminal connections like that.

Personally, I block them. But the people running these programs think they can get all of us. They don't seem to understand that the harder they try the more they piss off people like me. Meaning I'll put in more effort to circumvent or poison their data, making them spend a disproportionate amount of money on people like me. At this point I don't they'll give up, so let's find out who can live the longest. The number of people on my side are growing

I'm with you, but my take is that advertainment only scales big, so we are mostly collateral noise to the designers who have to balance many different factors, the main one bieng that the market they have brainwashed is as a result, fickle, and insists on bieng entertained, with most of the work force in advertising also consuming the product in a world of always almost, never quite satiated quest for the something™ that will get them off the treadmill. The very fact that anything imaginable is availible, anywhere, right now, up front, delivered ,only highlights the sameness of it all, where the tracking and fingerprinting results in people buying whatever they glanced at,casualy and inocently, but now own some glitzy cheap, likely broken facsimily, and are now under intense pressure to buy another one. So advertainment gives it's reek of edgy mindless frustration to the whole world. So ya, turn off scripts and storage, run some blockers, and remember to be nice to all the people actualy helping and doing things in the real world.

Sure but it's about pareto efficiency. How much do you capture? It's a percentage. But you have to spend infinite resources to get to 100%. They just see number go up...

I wouldn’t claim to not notice ads. Especially ads that interrupt videos. I remember quite a few of them. But, even the ones that are initially a little amusing become annoying with repetition, and what initially seemed mildly amusing instead seems just stupid.

I don’t know what “north face” is. Personally I have a strong preference to not display any brand logos myself. People considering some brand to be “fashionable” seems kind of absurd to me?

I don’t feel like the ads I’ve seen influence my purchasing decisions much? Because most of the things I see ads for, aren’t things I would be interested in. I get ads for like, women’s clothing (I’m a man) home shopping sites (not in the market to buy a house at this stage of my life), horror movies (which I hate to see).

Well, I guess some candy ads have influenced me, in the opposite direction from what they intended. A kind of candy which was once among my favorites, I found the ads objectionable to a degree which I have pretty much committed to not buying any of it until they substantially change their advertising. Another brand I’ve never purchased because an ad of theirs covered the content of a webpage I was trying to view and kind of broke the site, and so I kind of regard them as bad actors?

I’d be willing to give advertisers a lot of information about what I would be interested in if I could be assured that they wouldn’t try to combine that information with any other information about me.

Every person says this too, but it ignores the diversity in types of people. I know somehow who happily watches ads and makes purchasing decisions off it. I ignore them and do not. I don't believe I am being manipulated by the ads. The companies choose to advertise to target other people, and they lose money serving ads to people like me. But it's still a net win for them.

I stopped drinking soda this year and alcohol years ago. If you consumed any heavily advertised product this year, then you can't say ads don't work. Including products like Cursor.

Ads definitely have an effect on me: the more intrusive they are, the more I remember them and tend to not buy that product and ignore the company altogether.

But generally I'm not exposed to a lot of ads thanks to the adblockers I use. And the Duckduckgo browser on Android, besides generally blocking network access for apps with Netguard.

The massive industry exists vor various reasons, but mainly because people have been trained from early on to get something "for free" without pondering the hidden longtime costs.

Disclaimer: prefer to pay or sponsor useful apps or services instead. And my North Face wind stopper west is more than 20 years old, the raincoat 10+ years and both are still serving me well ;-)

>But somehow, when it's time to buy a jacket, you know about the brand, and know all the people in your socioeconomic circle seem to like it. //

Yes, but it's not usually a conscious thing. People assume that advertising doesn't affect them -- it does, it's brainwashing.

However, I've recently found that I'm so eager not to be swayed by advertising that I can't buy things I've consciously seen advertised at me because then `they` will have won. Of course I still pick out the fizzy drink brand advertised to me when I don't want to engage my brain over a triviality like picking a cold drink at work ...

I take a bit of an opposite approach. For the most part, if I'm stuck hearing an ad, I just blacklist the company.

There's 10's of us out there!

I mean, ads work same way those obnoxious Mr Beast faces in thumbnails work: I never click on any video like that, but they obviously work for attracting a general public. It's even kind of funny how aggressively the algorithm tries to push them to me: if I were to anthropomorphize it, I'd say it's palpable its desperation to drag me to a popular cluster

So, "ads work" doesn't mean they will work for everyone at the individual level or won't have the opposite effect for some.

I change my VPN country daily.

The ads are then in a language I don't even understand.. and for products not for sale in my country.

Still, your brain may remember the brands and so your purchasing decisions will be steered this way.

This is a top tier super power. Ublock on Firefox and AdGuard on iPhone are pretty effective. When I actually see an ad it physically hurts.

On iPhone check out Orion browser. Blocks ads, even on YouTube. Though sometimes video quality goes low (manually set it higher to fix). Firefox focus also works, but only one tab

If on Android, check out revanced. You can remove ads from lots of apps. Highly recommend Firefox as well.

Brave is also extremely effective at removing ads while keeping websites functional (including YouTube). It even has some fingerprinting protection. (and before someone complains, you can disable all the crypto stuff)

Sure but personally I'm against recommending different flavors of chrome. Brave is a nice idea but it still gives undue power to Google because at the be of the day, they control chromium. It also makes a hard problem for chromium reskins as they keep finding things chromium can use to track their users...

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