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Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps).

How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar to what I've already bought which I'm not going to buy again for a long time.

I admit seeing brands and advertising will introduce a bias but I can't see how it would influence me much when for important/expensive purchases I usually do a lot of research first.

I don't love advertising but if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount in return for many free services it doesn't really bother me.

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Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10... but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.

Well, my kids simply don't watch commercial TV. Everything used to be DVD based and now its all streamed, so they never see ads. I remember the first time they actually saw and advertisement - my son screamed! "Where did my show go??" "It's OK .. it's just an ad". A few seconds of silence passed and then he asked:"What's an ad?"

Congrats! This is really a great step forward, and may improve their childhood a lot. Children should become used to consume media at their own pace, without distracting noise (ads). Also, their schedule should be determined by their parents, not the TV program.

Moreover, it may help to make fun of the ads they still see. (on websites, outside at walls, etc.) This may improve their awareness, and hopefully later their critical thinking.

BTW, when I started not to watch TV anymore, I expected that I would miss something, but I didn't miss anything at all!

Friends told me about the few cool series I missed, and I simply bought the DVDs. It is a huge increase in comfort, watching those at my own pace, in their original length rather than the blown-up-with-ads length.

I have to wholeheartedly agree with everybsingle thing you've just said. This is why I love Netfix - there are lots of awesome shows my kids love like Hulk and the Agents of Smash, Spiderman and others I've forgotten.

Otherwise, they watch Australua's State run kids channel, which sounds awful but actually tends to run somewhat subversive shows like Yoohoo and Friends (universally panned by those who watched the original Korean version, but not by me or my kids!) and Adventure Time. And not a single advertisement, except promos.

Still have to find something for my daughter, who also loves those shows and we encourage her to watch them, but she is still into Shopkins (despite my best efforts of discouraging her) and other shows designed to appeal to her and her friends.

But she said watches absolutely no commercial TV. This is more by happy accident than design, because commercial TV in Australia is so completely rubbish that there is literally no need to watch it - ever!

This is an awesome story...would make for a great ad for Netflix (well irony aside).

I can vividly picture the "Where did my show go??" moment :)

Which would prove advertising works. The irony!

Your kids and yourself see ads all the time, just not on TV. There is no way to avoid ads, all ads are not evil either. Even if we talk only on TV, there are probably plenty in the shows / movies you watch.

Sometimes they are the shows you watch--as in, you may be watching a large advertisement with several smaller advertisements inserted into it.

Example: the Disneyland 60th Anniversary TV Special. Disney/ABC is particularly fond of advertising cross-medium Disney properties/investments on Disney-controlled television and radio broadcasts. For instance, Radio Disney definitely plays a disproportionately high number of DMG (Walt Disney Records + Hollywood Records/DMG Nashville) recordings.

My spouse was watching it. I saw 30 seconds of it and said, "this is a long format ad for Disney parks," before tuning it out.

The long-format ads are rather common on the local news broadcasts. Some stations show more than others.

They see ads on the web, but not on TV. Everything I stream is ad free.

I agree that's different, I was only talking about how I perceive how advertising impacts me.

This.

Consumption of advertisements should have age restrictions similar to cigarettes.

We haven't had cable/etc since 2005 and there was a period between '07 through maybe '13 where out kids weren't exposed to any TV commercials except for while visiting grandparents during holidays. The few commercials they saw over the years left a terrifyingly strong impression and desire for those products; they'd remember many, many months later. We still don't have cable, but unfortunately the expansion of content available on AppleTV has meant commercials jammed into everything. Contemplating returning to Netflix disc-only service and ending subscriptions to streamed content.

I'm curious what the effects of my seeing lots of TV ads during my childhood are. I honestly can't remember specific ads very well, but I'm sure that seeing thousands of soundbites glorifying instant gratification must have had some sort of an effect on me.

> How much are you really worried by this?

It's a very serious ethical issue. You might not have any exploitable weaknesses given the current technology, but other people do: alcoholism, pain medication, financial distress, loneliness, straight-up boredom...

>How much are you really worried by this?

I'm not much worried right now. I'm worried about where we are going, especially with machine learning. Take a look at the story of Target identifying when a girl was pregnant before her own father knew. Then apply this to any area where you have any reason at all to keep a secret. Maybe you are gay with parents who will rather you be homeless than living in their home. Maybe you have a mental illness but rather the rest of the world not know about it. Maybe you like democracy in a country where you aren't allowed to. Eventually they will find ways to tease this information out with all the data they have tracked about us.

>if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount

If it is unconsciously influencing you how would you know if it is only doing so "a tiny amount"?

Are you doing peer reviewed reproductible research, with both open source code and data and tyying to disprobe your hypothesis? </s>

Even researchers don't agree what are "acceptable" research findings [0].

I think that priming[1] would be an important factor to consider when doing "lot of" research. And, were someone going to dimiss it, they would need "extrordinary evidence" as the say goes.

Here is a testimonial of one of these "ideas" supporter:

   "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Attrib. Richard Feynman (|p| < 0.05)

The fact that "[you] can't see how it would influence [you] much" is one of the features of biases.

Regards

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29

Sure, but I'm saying I don't think the effect (which is non-zero) is manipulative enough to get annoyed about. I read people talking about ads as if you look at them and they compel you to buy something you never wanted.

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