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Comment by mysterypie | Hacker News Reader

> I often hear people say, “I use AdBlock, so the ads don’t affect me at all.” How head-smackingly wrong they are. Even if you don’t see the ads, you still see the ad for the ad (i.e. the product itself). You still get design that exploits your non-rational psychological biases in ways that work against you.

I don't understand how the website design manipulates you even when you've blocked the ad. I need an example here please.

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Think of a high-end clothing store where they offer you a cocktail while you shop. Now imagine you have an ad blocker that prevents you from seeing the clothes. You just walk in and they're happy to hand you a cocktail and you stand in an empty-looking room with a friend enjoying your free cocktails. You're still getting manipulated because the free cocktail brought you into the store. Without it you would have chosen to go somewhere else.

Or imagine you don't drink, and you go to a tapas place and buy some loss-leader food items and a water. You were manipulated by the loss leaders. They manipulated you into the place.

Of course what that comment is referring to is sites where the content is harmful, but no matter how sites sustain themselves, it's up to you to choose content that benefits you rather than harms you.

I believe he speaks of things like buzzfeed or other clickbait sites that are designed to keep you surfing and clicking, in chase of ever higher view counts.

I have a personal list of domains I consider useless. Accidentally visiting one was annoying enough to me that I made an FF extension to hide any links to those sites on every page of the internet. I've been wishing uBlock Origin had this feature built in, I haven't found a way to do this if they do. They advertise as a general-purpose blocker and I think this falls under that category. I know I could add any domain I want and it will prevent the page from loading but that still leaves me vulnerable to the click-bait titles and wasting time clicking.

Building a paid product, you want engagement to be high so that our users get value out of it and keep paying for it. With advertising, you want engagement to be high so that users see more ads. The difference is subtle but means that you design a product differently.

Facebook is a highly addictive attention machine. It is designed that way to serve you ads. Even if you block the ads, you can still get hooked on the machine.

Maybe you think that is the same thing as enjoying yourself as you wish. But the OP argues that just because something exploits our psychological biases, does not mean it is good for us in any deeper or longer-term sense.

e.g. plenty of evidence that Facebook is actively harmful for it's users.

I think it means that even if you don't have Adblock Software installed and you are the type to ignore all ads anyway those ads are technically succeeding. I'd imagine the thinking is that subconsciously you can't completely ignore an ad although the way this was worded is rather confusing and doesn't really make sense considering Adblock Software completely removes the entire ad.

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