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Comment by jason_s | Hacker News Reader

I just uninstalled a game from my mobile phone this morning that had heavy ad usage. It was interesting to note the different ad display strategies. From least to most annoying:

- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)

- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)

- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds

- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds

- display several ads in succession, each short, but it automatically proceeds to the next; the net time after which the "x" to close appears after 20-30 seconds

- display several ads in succession, each lasts for 3-10 seconds but you have to click on an "x" to close each one before the next one appears

I live in the USA. The well-established consumer product brands (Clorox, McDonalds, etc.) almost all had short ads that were done in 3-5 seconds. The longest ads were for obscure games or websites, or for Temu, and they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion. The several-ads-in-succession were usually British newspaper websites (WHY???? I don't live there) or celebrity-interest websites (I have no interest in these).

It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.

View on HN

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.

Mr. 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

Not the only thing he's guilty of.

explain

It's all a scam.

A 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.

That Colin Furze cameo was so weird.

From 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.

They somehow got him doing a cameo on this upcoming Survivor season and it's going to be terrible.

Luckily 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 :/

If 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.

Fully agreed.

The day youtube disables the "turn watch history off," is the day I'll stop using youtube.

I, too, could never go back.

This is basically what I do in NewPipe! Just a good ol' chronological list of my subscriptions, nothing else. Ahh if only everything could be this 2006...

> Opening the front page in a private view is a scary place of hyper-optimised drama and attention seeking.

Huh? Opening the front page of youtube in a private view (with no existing youtube history) shows you a completely blank page.

The blank page where it asks you to enter a search? This is a recent change I think. I want to say the last year or 2.

This must have changed at some point. It used to show popular videos in a private window.

You can still get a glimpse of what is out there by watching a specific video in a private window and looking at the recommendations.

It used to be very good, but now the personalized recommendations kind of suck. Seems like they enormously regressed, and basically do the 2009 move of just shoving the last type of video you watched in your face 37 times.

ahhh and i thought it was just me. cancelled my subscription and figured YT was just not caring anymore as a way to drag me back.

nah turns out it sucks for everyone.

Mr Beast not looking like a normal person next to Colin Furze is impressive.

That guy is so over the top that I cannot bear watching his videos, despite them theoretically being exactly up my alley. I like tinkering videos, I like his ideas, and the high-quality results, but I hate his mannerisms.

Every time see Mr Beast (I don't watch any of his stuff, just accidentally see promos on Prime sometimes), he reminds me of Homer Simpson's forced smile in the Simpsons' espiode "Re-Nedufication" [0].

[0]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/84/8e/c8848e81afa88a42bd4d...

MrBeast 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.

We’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.

The 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.

> [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).

In the Tiger era, the OS X start-up progress bar worked this way—it kept track of how long boot-ups would take, and then displayed its best guess based on that.

Many progress bars or other indicators lie, and the incentive is always to make it look good at the beginning, so that’s what we end up seeing most, whether it’s these ad ones (which thankfully I’ve never seen) or installers or especially something like Uber that always lies about how quickly someone is coming to make it appealing and then stretches it out. Even the thing in your car that tells you how much range you have left before refuelling (except it starts showing more than you actually have). I think in all cases it’s probably possible to give a more realistic estimate but it’s counter to the goals of whoever designed it.

> 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.

I 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%.

We all know the Microsoft progress bars reached 99% easily and had an infinite last % in the '90s. I'm still not convinced that was by accident.

Zeno’s progress bar.

If 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.

This 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.

With enough humans, it starts to look like a machine

Attention 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.

Oh, but then you’re the much-maligned hipster.

I 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"

What's the downside?

If the right type of mate uses those traits to find their type of mate there’s no downside.

I can't think of any. The upside is that people who think it's weird to not reflexively consume mass-market garbage identify themselves voluntarily, which makes it much easier to avoid them.

It’s basically drug dealing. Which is fine if you’re doing it for fun, but doing it to make money develops the most antisocial parts of a person

> when you're creating informal communications to other humans.

What he’s creating is fame and money for himself, the fact that it’s by doing videos is incidental. That’s why he also got into ghost kitchens, a game show full of corner cutting, and a theme park in Saudi Arabia open for under two months.

in other words his business model is fuck you pay me

at least 50 cent, who got into rap strictly for the money, made something fairly entertaining

At least 50 cent didn’t make TikTok style music with single polished part and junky rest of the song. Nowadays his goals looks almost innocent

>That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing aren’t by accident.

I take your point, but I am still baffled why people find this appealing.

Novelty goes a long way, old enough YouTube video are optimized for their time period and end up looking stylized in their own ways.

Fashion swaps styles fast enough most people can’t afford full wardrobes before it changes, which by default keeps each style looking fresh.

Maybe not appealing but interesting. Distinct enough from the rest of the thumbnails on the page to trigger an impulsive tap or click.

Appealing isn’t the goal. Catching someone’s attention is the goal. (Nobody thinks the balloons on the cars at the car dealership look good but statistics prove that balloons sell cars.) Then, triggering someone’s curiosity, which is more where the copy comes in. (You can increase your click count with this one weird trick!)

You’re subject to it every bit as much as me or anybody else, but for whatever reason, we have different triggers than the Mr. Beast crowd. People that think they’re immune to it after having it pointed out to them are likely just less aware than most how their emotions are being manipulated by things they don’t even consciously perceive. Sales guys love people like that.

If you're aware of it and think you're susceptible then you can make it impossible to be influenced by it. Ie, You can disable all 'related videos'/feeds/home page on Youtube with Unhook, and sponsored segments with SponsorBlock. I'll probably never see a Youtube thumbnail for the rest of my life, throw in Adblock and your exposure is extremely limited.

> Sales guys love people like that.

You can also easily never speak to them. I know they exist, but as a consumer I can't think of anytime I've had a sales interaction with a salesperson. I understand that some people do, and might even actively seek a salesperson - but if I go to a physical store I already know what I want to buy before I get there and the only interaction I might have is to ask how to find the thing I want.

I know it's a common argument/appeal to authority that advertising must work, because companies are still doing it - but there are economists who think that it might not[0].

[0]: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

> Ie, You can disable all 'related videos'/feeds/home page on Youtube with Unhook

This is not specific to YouTube. It’s billboards, product placement, etc etc etc.

> You can also easily never speak to them. I know they exist, but as a consumer I can't think of anytime I've had a sales interaction with a salesperson

Ok, so you make every major purchase online, probably don’t own a car, never purchased a home or lived in a city where its extremely difficult to rent without a realtor, never go out to restaurants or bars in the US where the service staff essentially works on commission in the form of gratuity… sure thing.

Thinking Sony would sell just as many products entirely based on word of mouth is absolutely absurd.

And as an aside, conversion measurement is der rigueur in digital advertising— for obvious reasons, companies don’t publish it. It is the basis for A/B testing which uses large sample sizes to see which presentation is more likely to make people do or not do something. It’s easier than ever to tell where someone was exposed to something and the click trail they took to end up on a purchase screen. I don’t, nor have I ever worked in digital marketing, but this information is extremely easy to find. Additionally, the Freakonomics guys are no strangers to vibing their way through topics they know nothing about and mistakenly assuming their brief thought experiments and unchallenged researchers have uncovered something useful. It’s not like they’re never right, but they’re no stranger to unforced errors in their analysis and you’d be wise to not rely on them as a source.

I somewhat suspect our difference here is cultural divide - I've never been to the US, but none of the things you mentioned have involved salespeople in my experience in Europe.

I live in a city, have a car (bought second hand), buy things in person, go to restaurants. We have no tipping or gratuity, apartments have a fairly standard application process and often it's a previous tenant showing you around because they want you to take over their lease, unless the apartment is empty.

It doesn't have to be appealing, it has to make you click.

Car crashes are not appealing, and yet it is something most people are tempted to look at. Many people think of dopamine as the pleasure hormone, not really, it is the motivation hormone, pleasure is one way to achieve that, but so is horror.

It makes evolutionary sense, if something horrible happens, you better pay attention, to get prepared so that it doesn't happen to you.

I don't know the details of the psychological response to Mr Beast thumbnails, and I think neither does My Beast himself, the analytics say it works and that the only thing that matters to him.

Guests smoking weed A/B tested too? :)

It seems we're living a Max Headroom episode.

How do you A/B test on YouTube?

Youtube lets you A/B test thumbnails as a creator and see response rates, for instance.

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/393332200/you-can-...

posted 12/8/2025, 11:24:26 AM

So like a month ago. How did Beast A/B test before then?

Hasn't this been around for ages?

They give access to these features to their partners before general release, but this A/B feature has existed for quite some time now. I’ve seen various Patreon tech creators run those A/B tests and see them discuss them in their creator Discords.

A small number of creators have had testing tools provided by YouTube for years.

He also changes the thumbnails and titles of videos once published, sometimes up to dozen times in the first day.

He also has dozens of channels for different languages, so can test thumbnails and other tweaks with those.

There'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...

Kind of like a genius idea. Though there should be a special place in hell for app owners who want this in their app.

I'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.)

IME it's a real close button but the ad opens the thing when it closes, regardless of how it closes.

A 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

Also making the hit area smaller than the close graphic itself is a popular one.

No, 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.

> The whole industry runs on scams like this

Wasn’t there an article here a few days ago about Facebook specialising in hiding such malicious ads from testers and law enforcement to maximise gains?

Yep: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook...

And here's the HN discussion about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446838

Yes. Basically the internet version of the Volkswagen emissions scandal.

  if(testdetected == 1)
  ecm.lowemissions
  else
  lmao.fuckyouregulators

the difference is that the average rube and/or average lawmaker have some basic understanding of how cars work.

petrol goes in, toxic gas comes out, so make toxic gas less.

most of them have 0% understanding as to how data mining works or how online ads (and scams) function

It was about advertising for scams, not tracking. That's easier to understand than a car.

As a sometimes designer, i don’t think there’s any distinction between punishing the ad and the company. The company bought the ad, probably directed its creation, and decided what its criteria was for success. 1-star away as far as I’m concerned.

I think they mean they leave a 1 star review on the app that was displaying the ad, who probably didn't directly do any of that.

They did work with a bad ad network though so it's a valid enough reason to complain imo.

Yeah, good call, but I honestly have no problem with that 1-star either. They can’t say “well we just opened the garbage conduit and pointed it at your face… we didn’t actually MAKE the garbage.” Those ads are part of their app experience, now. They published it, so they’re ’re responsible for it. If it sucks I give it a sucky rating.

Yep. There's no other way to maybe-convince them to get a different ad provider, because they're the ones that chose it (probably because it paid the most).

I feel the same way about newsletters.

“Hey you bought socks that one time! Want more socks??” -> Unsubscribe.

“Hey it’s your weekly sock news! What’s new in socks!” -> But I unsubscribed! Haha no, you only unsubscribed from the “product releases” list. Not the “weekly news” list or our 10 other fabulous mailing lists!

-> Report all emails from this domain as spam. May god have mercy on your soul, cute socks.

This is exactly something I hate about the current state of things.

Interacting with a company/organization immediately turns into a lifelong "legitimate relationship" that supposedly entitles them to contact you forever and ever.

Recently bought a GE oven. It had a minor problem and had a few service appointments. Not a huge deal, life moves on.

Meanwhile, near immediately, they would love a review! They want Participation in OUR new oven.

It's overwhelming, and most frustrating is it seems 'communication' is rapidly become a one way st.

I "love" the ones that randomly decide to reactivate literally years after unsubscribing and never interacting with the business again. The other day I randomly got an email from a yoga studio I once bought my wife a gift card from. We moved and neither of us has been there since 2021. Why on earth am I suddenly getting spam 5 years later. I get similar messages from hotels many years later too. Sometimes ones I didn't even end up staying at, just browsed. You can sense the desperation through the monitor.

I now militantly use apple’s “hide my email” function for this reason, though it doesn’t really work when you “need” to give your email address in person (I have a “junk” email address that’s normally turned off on my devices for those people)

This is usually against ad network rules, so if you're willing to go out of your way a bit, you can screenshot those ads and report directly to the ad network

QA is something an employee should do, not me.

Difficulty is when you don't know what ad network it is, the app hides the ad network they use, and refuse to disclose who it is.

You got served an ad from "one of our partners". That's all you'll get to know, and there's no mechanism to even report the app's shitty behavior to Google or Apple (and they don't care when the app becomes too large, either).

Which is often not possible because clicking an ad generally closes the ad. And there's no incentive for users to report, by design IMO.

They could have a separate ad-reporting UI in every ad-running app (so you can report stuff later), and they could reward valid reports by skipping all ads on their network for a month or something, but doing that would reduce fraud, and that means reducing their profit. So none of them do it.

I'd say they probably need an oversight committee with teeth, to strongly punish every single violation (so the networks develop functional defenses), but they'll probably just VW-emissions-fraud their way around it.

I'm not sure that is mostly the ad's fault. Hitting a target on a touchscreen is hard to do. This seems like it's the phone's fault first to me.

(If you're using a mouse, forget what I said. But I haven't run into an ad where the close button didn't close it... if you were able to click the close button.)

On iOS I have seen ads with very small close buttons, so clearly intended to cause people to miss-click. Buttons should be 44x44 pixels, it’s recommended in the human interface guidelines [0].

——

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

You mean like this:

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

Reminds me of Setup.exe

As 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.

I'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.

That’s perfectly acceptable, in particular if you also display “step x of 10”, so the user knows the bar doesn’t indicate time.

If 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.

If it froze and ceased emitting ticks, it wouldn't advance any more - but the larger point is well taken!

The Windows file copying progress bar prepared me for that one. I don't trust progress bars anymore.

Uber (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

The 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.

You likely turned off any privacy invading feature and didn’t let the app track across apps.

The fact you are getting irrelevant ads is a good thing that indicates that is probably working.

I can tell you how the ad companies will implement this. For Rewarded ads (the longest ones, that are at least 30 seconds, and sometimes as high as 60 seconds), they'll move to that succession model, but the succession will take you at least 30 seconds. Oh you skipped an ad after 5 seconds? No worries, here's another ad. You watched the first ad for the full 30 seconds? No more ads for you.

It'll probably be a win for them.

If it's a win they would do it already, no? There's no law against it, is there.

I've worked for two companies that did mobile ads, and one other that did web ads.

The web ad company was hampered by poor engineering and management that had big glory projects that were poorly conceived or too ambitious; they no longer exist.

The first mobile ad company was constrained by ethics and prioritized a better experience over earning that last fraction of a percent (though most people on the outside would disagree on principle).

The second mobile ad company had a decent API designer early, and managed to capture a specific role in advertising. That role gave them access to data that ended up being wildly useful for purposes other than it's original intention, and they've done well based on that. But they are completely mired in in-fighting, executives who only bother to come in and be seen for quarterly results, and they don't do *anything* unless someone else does it first. They don't have a functional legal department and engineers are afraid that their head will be on the block if something goes wrong, and everyone is afraid of killing the golden goose.

So no, I suspect it hasn't happened because almost nobody thought of it, and the people that did are too afraid to be a trailblazer.

And we've already seen the precursors for it. Chaining multiple short ads together to add enough value to be worth it for an in-game reward is the beginning of it. It's not a very far leap.

Some "news" sites are so annoying about their ads, I just close the tab and google for someone else's version of the story. I block sites that show up in my news feed often but display more nag than content.

I'm sure in their mind, they don't care about me leaving. Apparently more than enough people put up with it to keep the site viable.

lite.cnn.com is the best lightweight news site I know of, though it is still CNN and probably more US-focused.

There is also https://text.npr.org

impressive... let's see the page source

they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion

I wonder how much risk there is to brands due to this sort of thing? I tend to feel the same way; are we just uncommon?

The only place I see ads is Amazon Prime Video (b/c I'm still irked they changed the deal and added ads). I've come to hate those companies whose ads I see over and over and over again and I've resolved to never buy anything from them. I even used one of their products regularly and switched to a competitor due to their ads.

Can't measure it thus does not matter

(It absolutely matters imo)

what's sad is that it's not the company who is causing you to see that ad fill, few companies want you to be spammed back to back with the same ad. it's the low ad fill rate on the platform or target for you meaning the company is one of the few ads in the pool. I look at it as they're trying to support the type of content you watch but not many people are. or trying to sell to you specifically.

early on in streaming there'd be so little fill you'd be getting mad at say blizzard for spamming ads in a games related place but they were the only one buying ads and supporting those streams. it's not blizzards fault taht the rest of the advertisers didn't trust that channel and.

I uninstall all games with any ad usage.

The latest was "I Love Hue". It let me play 10 levels (nice) and then put ads in. If they had just asked for $1 before showing the first ad I might have paid but as soon as I saw the ads I just uninstalled.

Note: IMO "I Love Hue" is a $1 game. I'm happy to pay $$ for bigger games and often do though on Switch/Steam, less on mobile.

My wife played one of those unscrew games which showed lots of ads in between runs. I convinced her to buy the ad-free package for $5, so she doesn’t have to endure those ads.

While the game indeed was ad-free after that, there was no progress possible anymore as everything suddenly cost 3x the virtual coins than before. Basically forcing you to shell out even more money to buy their stupid coins.

We’ve refunded the IAP and that was that.

i don't understand why more tech savvy people don't use on-device DNS blocking like with RethinkDNS

> It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.

We should just ban all online ads then. I honestly think we would be better off. Yes, some things that used to be completely free would start costing a little bit, but I don't think we would lose much of value, really. And there would still be lots of different ways that consumers could discover goods and services if we didn't have online ads, it would just be via directories where consumers could go and search for products instead of consumers being bombarded with information noise all the time.

The freemium ad-revenue model is a local maximum which results in a whole lot of shittiness.

And just so we're attacking the problem from both sides: the dark pattern on the advertisers side is the inability to easily opt out of in-app ads when advertising on Google's display network. For the reasons you listed, in-app ads generate an incredible amount of low quality clicks, yet Google makes it very hard to exclude yourself from that ad inventory.

The only way I've found to do it so far is to manually exclude yourself from every individual app category. IIRC there are over a hundred categories and you need to manually go through and select every category to exclude your ads from mobile apps.

There's also the tactic where the layout of the page/app reflows after a second or two, changing where the ads are. It drives me up the wall. Go to tap on a button, SURPRISE, an ad popped in where the button used to be 10ms before you touched the screen and now you're forced into some company's site whether you wanted to see it or not.

This is my biggest frustration with ads. It will surely cause fake statistics for ad campaigns too: 99% of time when I click ad, it is by mistake.

I discovered that the samsung good lock sound assistant lets you mute all sound from specific apps and allow specific apps to never have their sound be interrupted. So it mute games and have audiobook players to always play audio and this lets me listen to audiobooks while playing games and never have the adds interrupt audio.

My absolute favorite is the smaller “picture in picture ad” that gives you a way to immediately dismiss it with a “X” that looks like microfiche - the cynic in me assumes that this is so the average user will fat-finger it by mistake making it look like a conversion.

I have a turn-based game that I play with remote family and after I play my turn, I swipe the app off (force close) so I don't have to see the ads. It used to be that I could just switch away to skip the ads but they must have gotten wise to that because one day it stopped working.

I know plenty of folks here make lots of money off it, but ad tech is straight up malware. I got lucky and found uBlock Origin many years ago so I did not get slowly boiled in worsening ad tech. I can't believe what people put up with just to not pay a few dollars for software they use daily. Not to even mention that the worst part of it all is ad tech has ruined the internet beyond repair.

Because a few dollars here and there very quickly adds up, especially for people in poorer countries. It's also much harder to get people to spend money online. I bet if you could physically buy the suffrage for $1-5 people would be far more likely to pay for it.

A particularly egregious offender is Kalshi ads. They regularly play for a minute, sometimes up to two minutes before they can be closed.

I would not be surprised if the incentives are in place for ad networks to push for longer ads and for advertisers to create longer ads.

What about the ones that automatically open the Play Store to the app they're advertising after the ad? I would've thought it's against Play Store ToS to manipulate view count, but clearly Google has a conflict of interest.

You missed one of the worst: mandatory interactive ones.

My wife is a sucker for these horribly generic flashy F2P puzzle-ish games. There are these ads that pop up every N action or something; some of these look like a mini-game and are actually an ad for another of those F2P games, and you have to play the mini-game that showcases some dumb simple mechanic of the game it advertises for a little bit before you can dismiss the ad.

Some come complete with two trivially easy levels ONLY 20% OF PLAYERS CAN PASS SOLVE THIS that glorify you OMG YOU HAVE SUCH HIGH IQ then one impossible that taunts you into installing the game.

The predatory dark patterns are so obvious they should be trialed to oblivion but no apparently this kind of abuse is legal.

whoa -- I've never run into these. I've seen interactive puzzle ads, but the "X" to close always pops up in 20-30 seconds.

I noticed an interesting hybrid – you get an interactive ad, if you interact with it, complete the level, engage with the ad etc. you get the close button immediately, if you idle you have to wait ~30 seconds. Feels very deplorable to me.

Google's AdMob has been doing these. Often it's something simple like completing a puzzle. I hate that I prefer these ads because it shortens the time until I get back to my game.

I don't think I'm especially stupid and I try very hard not to interact with ads more then I have to, but I have often found it impossible to escape those ads without ending up being delivered to the app store page.

Maybe I didn't notice the X in some part of the display or whatever, but even if by making a concerted effort to not do it, you still "convert", their click though stats must be crazy.

Some of these ads are annoying, almost all of the them are dumb, but if you think they're abusive, I don't think you know what the word abuse means.

abuse

noun

/əˈbyo͞os/

1. the improper use of something.

the word is ab-use and it means to misuse

If you don't think lying/tricking/manipulating people is abusive, then you might want to reflect on that.

You don't have to play it. You can but you don't have to. The skip or close button will appear after a set amount of time (like in any video ad). It feels like you need to play or you'll be stuck but you won't.

The funny thing is that any company that has their ad displayed to me like this makes me just hate them.

So what? People hate lots of companies but still they give them their money.

My favorite mobile game ad was for Jeep, which was 3 seconds of the word JEEP on a black background. My wife and I laugh about it, but we remember it. It was actually really effective in that regard.

My second favorite was for some pirate game, but the ads were basically the setup for an adult movie, with tons of hammy overacting. I thought they were so funny, I was really sad when they stopped.

I'm OK with a unobtrusive banner ad. I hate forced ads that get in the way of my flow (whether it's gaming or reading or work). I hate forced ads that can't be skipped.

I understand the reason for these (they often have an IAP that will remove ads, so the more annoying the ads the more likely folks will be tempted to buy it). But doesn't make it ok. I usually just leave a one star review and uninstall.

Some time ago, Google AdMob started using a new format ads - two videos, one immediately after another, unskippable for the first 60s, sometimes more. You know how they called them? "High-engagement ads". On some level, it's hilarious.

I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times. I swear i have woken up in the middle of 20+ minute ads. I thought it was a news article about china when it was an ad. Who knows when the skip button appeared. The few times i have seen these, it has always been a literal fake news show about china.

I've seen these advertisements too, also only when my phone had been playing unattended for some time.

I have a (unsupported, unsubstantiated) theory that YT detects phones of "sleepers" and pushes more profitable content with the understanding it won't be skipped.

I've got a few spare phones, maybe I'll run an experiment.

With YT, it might be an account-specific metric. Ie: flagged as a frequent sleeper. This would not surprise me, since they track just about every other metric possible against your account.

You can have multiple YT accounts on a single gmail acct, but I don't think that'll fool them. They know where you initially logged in from. So you will likely need multiple gmail accounts to do this kind of experiment.

Good shout.

They don't have SIMs, they'll be connected to a VPN router, and I'll create new Gmail accounts for each device, from each device.

I don't think they specifically target people who tend to go to sleep. But, having worked in the ad engineering, I can imagine they do know how often specific users skip ads and target ads based on that property.

I'm not sure why it would specifically be targeting "sleepers"... there are a lot of reasons why someone might not skip ads... people who are sleeping are probably the least valuable of them.

It could just as well be something super valuable -- like an unattended kiosk device playing youtube to a crowd of people.

Regarding the kiosk, I wholly expect that an unattended device with YT on auto play will ratchet up the length/frequency of ads as long as they're never skipped.

Someone who falls asleep watching YouTube will skip ads, unless they're asleep.

The idea is that if YT can infer that someone is asleep (location, no movement, no sound, low light, night) that they can show the longest, most skip-inducing ads that they've got since they know they won't be skipped.

The difference between the kiosk and the sleeper is that if the sleeper gets a 20 minute ad at 2pm while they're eating lunch, they'll skip it. YT is incentivized to show the most profitable ad that someone won't skip.

The value in identifying sleepers isnt showing a long ad, it's showing a long ad with the certainty that it won't be skipped.

Sure, but why would I, as an entity buying advertising space, pay the same amount when YouTube is just going to try to show them to people who are asleep, that can't see the ads, and thus would have no effect anyway?

Your question boils down to "If I was buying a product from a company, and they made it worse, why would I pay the same price for it?"

Because YouTube has a functional monopoly on online video advertising in a huge number of markets.

Enshitification is not just for YouTube's viewers and creators.

They also do this with kid’s content on YT but they make it look like a show basically. Might not happen on YT Kids, I basically never use either, but the few times we pulled up YT proper I’ve seen it happen. Get a few videos deep and they slip them in

> I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times.

Interesting new opportunity for YouTube here. Detect your usage patterns and near bed time show you increasingly boring content until you fall asleep, then fill your head with subliminal messages in these long ads.

Why would they help you sleep and take a gamble on subliminal anything working when they can just do it when you're awake?

I'm just spitballing sci-fi here, but maybe subliminal ads work better and their metric asston of computational models have told them so.

I suspect that they are already doing that (or something like it) as I've seen certain content appear at specific times/days.

One of the smarter product decisions they made was to tweak the algorithm to show different types of content based on time (and device). If it’s past 9:30pm and it’s the bedroom tv it suggests vastly different stuff than 6:30am on the living room tv. And for good reason! I’m not watching some slow “adventures through the milky way at light speed” video when I’m waking up!

It’s very smart about that stuff!

I'm a heavy YouTube watcher (My rewind said I watched 4500 different channels last year) and agree too. The content I get recommended is different day vs night. It's also device dependent (even when logged into same account) - my TV and phone definitely have a slightly different algo.

I fall asleep to YT sometimes watching speed runs when I have a hard time sleeping. When I wake up it is mostly running live streams of religious chants going in a loop. Hindu, muslim, orthodox christian. Or some strange genre of a Japanese anime girl making sounds.

Shortly before I started paying for YouTube, I remember seeing one of those ultra-long ads. The ad seemed interesting, so at first I didn't want to skip it. As soon as I saw that it was a looooong ad I got into the habit of checking the length of an ad before I even considered if it's worth watching.

Now I just pay for Youtube. I'm a lot happier that way.

Time is money. Ten minutes of daily YouTube ads adds up to 5 hours a month. Premium costs $14, roughly an hour's work at minimum wage. Trade one hour of labor for four hours of free time. That's 48 hours back each year for $168. It's a no brainer. Even if your wage is half of 14 dollars, you would still gain 24 hours back and it would still be worth it.

or install ublock origin and keep your money and the time!

while depriving google of revenue AND costing them money

win, win, win and WIN

Also decreasing the likelihood of content that you like watching gets made? The creator is being paid from that ad revenue too.

Or maybe they will move to a platform that respects them. Gotta start somewhere.

They're on YouTube because it's the platform that gives them the greatest chance of success. What other popular video platforms do you know that give you 55% of the ad revenue?

if my viewing actively cost the video creators money from me watching I'd probably feel guilty and stop

but this isn't the case, I'm completely cost neutral to them

but it does directly cost Google money... and I'm perfectly fine with that

I'm not making a moral judgement here. I'm talking about sending a signal that this type of content is valuable to make, leading to more content of that type being made.

I watch YouTube on many devices through the app. At the time, I was using YouTube music.

I've seen bands release music in those long ads, a complete movie, a 2 hour podcast, and tons of the fake news stuff. I think for some its a unique way to advertise and get exposure, others is just YT farming adtime.

If are using Android, it's easy to block these ads with apps like Netguard or even PCAPDroid

Then can use the game without annoyance of ads

As it happens, the data collection, surveillance and ad serving strategies of the mobile OS vendors and their unpaid "app developer" independent contractors are still subservient to application firewalls and/or user-controlled DNS

This could change one day, it's within the control of the mobile OS vendors, but I have been waiting over 15 years and it still hasn't

In a lot of these games you need the 'coins' you get from watching the ads to progress.

This is why instead of specific legislation that winds up being a cat-and-mouse game with companies, the practice of creating specialized agencies with a general charter and delegating the specifics to them is often employed.

But it's also why this administration is dismantling those agencies as fast as it can -- without them the legislature will always be hopelessly behind on proper regulation.

"This administration" being the US, I assume. Note that the article is about Vietnam.

My most favorite annoying thing about ads is the 'x' close button. They make it very small almost impossible to be perfect. I end up clicking the ads 50% of the times. Been running PiHole at home network for almost 8yrs happily. The ads come into play only when I am traveling.

For people with iPhones I recommend an "Apple Arcade" subscription, especially if you have kids. All games included in Arcade are ad free. They have a big enough collection.

> It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.

As is often the case I think that means the restrictions should just get even more strict, e.g., "no ad may ever be longer than X seconds and no app may ever show more than Y seconds of total ads within any 24-hour period". Then add some extra clause like "any attempt to circumvent or subvert these rules is punishable by fines up to 10x the company's gross annual revenue, plus asset forfeiture and prison for executives". People at companies should be deathly afraid of ever accidentally crossing the line into abusive behavior.

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