Hacker News Reader

Comment by meheleventyone | Hacker News Reader

90% of active ad watching in the US is probably from tourists watching with morbid fascination. I know it’s one of the things I do when bored in a hotel room.

View on HN

I'm so glad this isn't just me. I especially enjoy the disclaimers at the end of pharmaceutical ads.

I wonder if it's the same as in German pharma ads, which end with a grey screen with the following text in white font:

"Zu Risiken und Nebenwirkungen fragen Sie Ihren Arzt oder Apotheker."

which translates to:

"Concerning risks and side effects please ask your doctor or pharmacist."

Oh, no these things are hilarious. They actually name all the possible individual side effects (some of which sound much worse than the original condition) but it's done in a voiceover that's played at like 2x the original speed.

Oh wow, that's really just unnecessary.

It's basically the same as cookie banners: regulators said they had to, so they comply in the most obnoxious and least helpful way possible.

we need a classification such as Malignant Compliance.

And they inevitably end with "or death". I'm guessing they choose to list every vaguely possible side effect for CYA purposes, while simultaneously obscuring the actual risk profile by withholding information on the frequency of any given side effect.

It's like pestering users with alerts. After a certain point, you can't really blame someone for tuning them out and just clicking OK.

No, amusingly, it's a regulation thing. Health products are urged to list all negative outcomes seen in the experimental group, which can lead to some amusing outcomes

https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/18/covid-vaccine-volunteer-struc...

(Hard to find a nice source for this because there's a metaphor going around now about covid vaccines and lightning, but I saw it around more at the time. If anyone is better at search engines with date filtering or has a super reputable link, please share it below)

I'm probably one of them. Sometimes when I'm very bored I spend some minutes watching the ads from foreign channels. Every country does them slightly different.

Haha you’re not wrong. SlingTV is chock full of ads but sometimes I just sit through them because they’re like a lens into American domestic culture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com