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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

I think my brain developed that as a defense mechanism. The web cultivated a certain kind of blindness where I literally don't look at certain parts of pages because my brain has learned that there is never anything useful there. Sometimes I just cannot see things unless I force my eyes to move across the page linearly, top to bottom.

This is pathological. Like I find myself not ever looking at the top result in a search, because that is where Google has been putting ads.

Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it.

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I was asked to test the redesigned web page of a large bank. They had eye tracking cameras and such hooked up to study how I used the web page.

They ran through some scenarios, and one was how to get a car loan. I studied the homepage and found nothing, then clicked the menu and found loans, but no car loan on the loans page. I ended up searching and found it.

After each scenario they asked me some questions, and the first question I got for the car loan scenario was why I hadn't clicked on the link on the front page. There was no link, I replied puzzled. There was a large image they said. I stared in disbelief.

The person running the scripts navigated to the homepage, and pointed at the screen. There, at the bottom, a blinking banner about car loans.

I replied that it must have triggered my mental ad blocker, since ads are typically banners, frequently near the edges and animated somehow, so I never even registered the banner.

They looked genuinely puzzled at my response.

This was 25 years ago. My mental ad blocker is still active, though uBlock Origin on Firefox takes care of most of them.

For me physical ad blocking is more about a first-line defense against malware and such than it is about getting rid of obnoxious ads. The latter my mental blocker does fine enough, though it can be annoying.

I guess it’s ages of fake download button ads in download pages.

My instinct is “if it is an ad, then whatever it is offering is a scam”.

Also known as banner blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness). I'm genuinely surprised that a UX person doing usability testing (for a website!) has never heard of this. But I guess there's people missing basic knowledge in every field.

Let's also note that they did say "25 years ago". UX research then and now was, at the very least, different, and there was less experience with web-specific behaviour. I'd also note that it was mostly graphic designers doing web design back then, or maybe that's just me.

To be fair it was quite a long time ago, and as I recall the person guiding and asking questions was from the market research company. The web designers and whatnot was not in the room, but viewed the session remotely and could tell the person with me what to ask and such.

> Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it.

It's not computers that are the problem, it's people.

We've normalized (and even embraced) the situation where relationship between businesses and customers is adversarial. The phenomenon you're describing, known as "banner blindness", is just brain filtering out noise, but the thing is, that noise didn't get there by accident.

What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.

I mean. That's how profiteering works for the most part. Extracting wealth from people who don't know better is many times easier than creating more wealth for everyone.

> What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.

This is a simplistic way to think about it. Even the most altruistic physician needs to advertise their services if they hope to make a living out of it. Even the best film maker, the best actor needs to "hit the circuits" to promote their movie.

"Make and they'll come" is only possible if you're already successful. Apple can chose not to advertise, since they are Apple (although they do plenty of advertising themselves).

The physicians doesn't need to shove ads in front of people's faces in order for people in need of a physician to find him.

> "Make and they'll come" is only possible if you're already successful.

That's just because your competitors are already shoving ads in front of your potential customer's faces. If they weren't allowed to do that you would be fine without doing it as well. It's the definition of a zero sum game.

All-time classic stack overflow thread where someone is asking why everyone seems to ignore a large banner on top of his page that strongly resembles an ad: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/120541/why-do-people-...

> What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings

This is a thought I want to pull on

I have a view that organisations, with their network of misaligned incentives, mean that companies act something like an alien lifeform. Something with a decentralised brain, unable to plan beyond immediate stimuli

Companies consume and self-cannibalise. They are both aggressively rational in pursuit of profit but irrational when it comes to preserving their ecosystems

Many companies look like groups of people where nobody has total control. Everyone is reacting to some stakeholder, even the CEO is terrified of "the shareholders". So these organisations cut off healthy limbs (layoffs), engage in lurid rituals (AI), and wastefully destroy the natural resources of the humans who work for them

I first heard this idea in a James Bridle lecture, where he suggested that the strange behaviour of companies was a good starting point for understanding what an alien lifeform might behave like. And he observed the ways that humans and machines now mirror each other.

Inside our society, controlled by these aliens, humans act like machines (Taylorism at work, self-censorship for algorithms at play). Machines act like humans (AI, spam, computer programs mediating relationships).

Underneath it is a frantic need to quantize everything so it can be dominated

Yes!

Corporations were the first paperclip maximizers.

This reminded me of an old documentary about corporations: "If we look at the corporation as a legal person, it exhibits all the characteristics of a psychopath" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5hEiANG4Uk

I remember recently they polled workers about AI pressure: "the AI doesn't work very well, but my boss wants to see me using it." They polled the boss: "I didn't say they had to use it, they're choosing to use it and this'll look good to the executive". The executive: "well this costs a bunch but it'll look good to shareholders and we should encourage more use so it'll look even better." The shareholders: "do we look like we give a shit?"

Out of all of them, I'd assume the shareholders to be wrong.

Look at the state of the world. Yes, you do look like you give a shit.

Also there's an effect here where if just 10% of shareholders care about this it still makes sense to go for it if you think you can be faster than your competition.

Can you name any shareholders of Microsoft who pushed for renaming Office to Copilot?

Corporations are too complex for any single person to truly control. Attention of leadership necessarily dilutes with each additional layer of management. The result is this weird corporate chaos where nobody is completely in charge because everybody has to take charge of something, however small, to progress, or the whole could accomplish nothing at all.

The result is this flailing tentacled monster where each appendix seems to have a mind of its own and sometimes littlw regard for even the other parts of its own body.

> all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.

Local incentives. Every single person and entity is just maximizing their gain against the rules and rewards. The way you become really powerful and rich is to create an organization where all the local incentives keep funneling to you, sitting at the top.

The relationship was always adversarial for all history. Bakers used to mix sawdust with flour to profit more. The only counter has been regulation and oversight.

Bad actors have always existed but that doesn't mean that the proportion of bad actors and the effects they can have hasn't changed. "normalized" is the key world in gp's comment here - many people can't seem to even imagine a world without ads from the comments this subject gets whenever it comes up.

> businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings

What they do is actually a robbery of others' time, privacy, screen space, money, and freedom. All for profit.

I have this same affliction and have used ad-blockers for as long as I can remember. People seem to associate importance or quality with clutter. The more there is going on, the better it must be. My brain has just learned that certain page elements are never going to bring value and therefore don't exist.

Very rarely I'll come across a page where valuable information is hidden in those areas and it takes someone else showing me to actually see it.

> I think my brain developed that as a defense mechanism. The web cultivated a certain kind of blindness where I literally don't look at certain parts of pages because my brain has learned that there is never anything useful there.

I’ve fallen victim to this when I was doing coursework in the last decade.

Either a moodle module or a block of text in box in a textbook had something important to the concept I was learning, but I subconsciously ignored it because it had a format similar to an internet ad.

Something to ad to the long list of "real costs of ad-supported content and services".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness

The term is 28 years old.

These days ads are woven in to content itself. It's most obvious on youtube where youtubers are paid to talk about products and disguise it as reviews or informative. Or other content creators happening to show something mixed in with the normal content.

Soon they will be woven in to LLMs where they suggest the things they are paid to suggest.

I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on an add on purpose on a website (I’ve definitely click on one or two a month because of dark patterns). I’m always perplexed as to who is clicking on them because like you they’re just noise I don’t pay attention to.

The same people who still pay for cable and get roped into spending half an hour watching an infomercial at 4am.

>This is pathological. Like I find myself not ever looking at the top result in a search, because that is where Google has been putting ads.

Why put up with that? Is Kagi too expensive for you?

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